And so the rear-guard action continues: the hue and cry from some journalists and writers who apparently blast bloggers but have assumed the attributes of some of the Internet’s laziest bloggers who they try to lump together with the increasingly enterprising ones:
Some of these critics of blogs:
a) don’t do their homework.
b) lash out as blogging and bloggers as a whole just the way the bloggers that they apparently don’t like may lash out at others.
c) show they apparently don’t spend more than a few minutes surfing the Internet for blog and then focus on the ones they feel are written by name callers (blogs with posts that resemble the “trolls” in comments that many site such as ours are sometimes blessed with).
The latest came in THIS L.A. Times piece, “Blogs: All the noise that fits” by former Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Skube. Among other things, he says blogs do not do real journalism.
WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Wrong.
Anyone who visits The Moderate Voice (and we urge new readers to do so several times a day and to tell all your friends — and if you don’t like it, tell all your enemies) will note that we applaud original reporting on weblogs, which can and increasingly are being used for far more than extended-op pages or…in some cases… lash-out-and-demonize cyberspace versions of right and left wing talk radio shows. If you read our site, you’ll see we do have occasions to applaud and we do. Loudly.
But apparently Mr. Skube never read (or forgot about reading) The Talking Dog who has done incredible original interviews with lawyers defending clients at Guantamo and elsewhere. Or Michael Totten with his foreign reporting. Or the sometimes controversial Dean Esmay who has interviewed people on topics such as cancer and other topics. Or THIS SITE that interviewed Ed Schultz, a TV producer, and even some political candidates. Or Firedoglake’s reporting from the Plamegate trial. Or the ever thoughtful Oxblog which has been doing some first rate original reports and interviews from time to time over the years. And there are many more examples.
Suggesting that blogs don’t do it is inaccurate.
But the real slam-dunk, home run statement on this can be found in this L.A. Times op-ed piece by Jay Rosen, a journalism professor who is also perhaps the best blogger on media issues on the entire Internet. Here are parts of what he wrote (but you need to read this IN FULL):
Blowback! That’s what you’re in for when a great American newspaper runs a Sunday opinion piece as irretrievably lame as “Blogs: All the noise that fits” by Michael Skube (Aug. 19). Skube is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning author who teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina.
He then site some pieces Skube has written in the pass giving the back of his hand to bloggers and blogging.
Notice that not having time to read them didn’t prevent Skube from writing about blogs, which could be considered odd behavior for a college professor. (We’re supposed to read a lot, then write.) I can’t link to his ’05 piece because, according to Diane Lamb, a librarian there, “Skube does not permit his columns to be available in the online public archives of the News & Record.”
Ed Cone, a local journalist who also keeps a blog, called him up back then to ask Skube where he got his understanding of blogs, because his column hadn’t mentioned any. Skube said he had “scanned a bunch of blogs,” but could think of only one scanee, Andrew Sullivan. “Given his statement that blogs don’t do real journalism, I asked him what he thought about Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo,” Cone wrote. “He remembered Marshall as a magazine writer, but was unfamiliar with his blog, or its new investigative-reporting plan.”
And worse:
Story jumps to last Sunday. Josh Marshall reads his name in Skube’s column. Strange, because Marshall’s blog isn’t representative of the charges, which are depressingly familiar. “The blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more,” Skube wrote. But there’s a lot more than bubbling opinion at Marshall’s bustling site, which includes TPM Muckraker, where two full-time investigative reporters work. Had the author ever seen it?
In an email exchange, the author tells Marshall, “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site.” Huh? Turns out an editor stuck Marshall’s name in there because the column didn’t have enough examples in it. Skube agreed to the script change, but this meant he had no idea what his character was saying.
Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper man, calls it “journalistic malpractice.” And it is that. Also pedagogical buffoonery. In Skube’s columns, there’s a teacher who doesn’t believe in doing his homework – any homework.
So, as Rosen notes:
So I did it for him. I asked friends in the blogosphere to help me put together a list of examples that would confound Skube if he knew of them, but possibly interest his students. Blog sites doing exactly what he says blog sites don’t do: “the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence … the depiction of real life.”
Go the link above to Rosen’s piece and read it. It is impressive.
And devastating. He comes up with MANY examples of original blog reporting — and gives you the links so you can see them for yourself.
Here are a few quick observations on the ongoing tensions between the mainstream media and bloggers:
(1) Some working journalists look down on bloggers, who they feel only give their opinions and don’t offer original, confirmed facts. But there are other attitudes at play. Most journalists who worked at any time in their lives for mainstream media outlets had to jump through all kinds of academic, pay-your-dues-at-smaller-market and brutal office politics hoops to get where they are. Where are they? The Powers That Be have given them assignments to write and market their work. But bloggers are these people who didn’t have to jump through the hoops. They just took it — and write and publish online for all to see, without having to jump through hoops for anyone (unless they write post specially aimed at getting a link from a big left or right blog). They online, write and publish for all to see. Who gave them the right to do this the “easy” way?
(2) Some bloggers look down on working journalists even though if you cut out the work that most weblogs quote and discuss based on links to mainstream news reports, you’d have some very small weblogs. The disdained mainstream media provides most of the raw material used for blog posts.
(3) Some of blogging is people venting their anger. This is OK unless it goes over the line, is discredited and truly comes across to nonbloggers are hate or unadulterated political partisan hackery. Some nonbloggers tell me they don’t read blogs because if they want to hear someone with a political axe to grind they can listen to Rush or Randi.
(4) When bloggers really mess up, it feeds the image of weblogs as the wild woolly West in terms of facts and accuracy. Many bloggers feel what they do is noble. But due to the excesses and occasional lashing out of some on the right and left, bloggers still have this image among some as overcaffeinated folks who are so angry they seem to have had hemorrhoid transplants. Again, people will GENERALIZE. (And its a mistake because there are many excellent thoughtful bloggers on the right, left and in the center).
(5) Many media types are upset at what is happening to the mainstream media with its shrinkage of ad revenues, newspaper news holes, musical-chairs ownership changes, and the fact that newspapers in particular can’t compete in terms of delivering immediate written information as well as blogs do. And many media types are aware that many younger readers do not EVEN READ newspapers anymore but get their information online (or from Jon Stewart).
So there is resentment…which can lead to generalizations and sloppy reporting on the part of those who are aghast at what they consider generalizations and sloppy reporting on weblogs.
And, yes, you do see some generalizations and sloppy reporting on weblogs.
But not on all.
PS: Mr. Skube. As I write this, I’m not in my pajamas.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.