Pajamas Media, the new bloggers group that has been touted as a possible model for pooling bloggers’ talents and perhaps increasing their income, seems to be generating controversy even before it’s officially launched.
First, there were some bloggers who felt they were treated shabbily.
And now there’s their choice of a keynote speaker someone who (earth to Pajamas Media organizers) is highly controversial and in some eyes “damaged goods,” New York Times reporter Judith “I-forgot-the-name-of-my-key-source” Miller.
Jeff Jarvis, a blogger from a print media background with a journalism degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism writes in this must-read post here his dismay over PJ Media’s selection (perhaps they could have picked someone slightly less controversial — how about Robert Novak?):
Judy Miller makes one lousy poster girl. So why does she keep ending up on posters? And what does this say about the poster makers? Don’t they care about her credibility and their trust?
The Society of Professional Journalists chose to give Miller its First Amendment Award and also chose not to criticize her ethical lapses….
Pajamas Media chose to have Miller keynote their grand opening. I stated my puzzlement at this here, provoking a personal attack from one of their number…
I don’t understand how these players can separate her credibility and ethical behavior (as defined by such thing as SPJ’s code of ethics) from their own credibility and trust. Like it or not, we in journalism are judged by our worst work and what we do about it. When we circle the wagons to defend fellow journalists instead of defending the truth, we lose trust. I tell editorial organizations trying to improve quality that it’s more important to raise the bar at the low end than the high end because of this. I’m not even saying whether Miller should be fired or treated as a pariah — I said she should do the profession a favor and quit — but I certainly don’t think she should be held up as a paragon of anything. She messed up her reporting and didn’t fess up and still blames her unnamed sources and broke rules and, from what I can tell, made herself the center of a cause more for self-promotion or bullheadedness than for the cause itself. And we should trust her? And others should trust us for trusting her? Why?
Perhaps it’s because I also come from a print media background and have a journalism degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism but I agree totally with Jarvis. It’s a VERY questionable choice.
This is akin to you visiting a friend who automatically assumes you love Al Franken and you’re a Republican and he insists you listen to Franken. OR that he assumes you love Rush Limbaugh and you’re a Democrat and he insists you listen to Rush. Because he likes something, he thinks everyone else must feel the same way.
Miller is controversial and enmeshed in one of the biggest controversies of the Bush adminstration. Many aspects of the role she played, her ethics and whether she fell into the trap of getting so close to her sources that she bonded with them to the point of compromising necessary journalistic distance are still unresolved. We may never have the full answers. Please read our previous posts HERE.
Jarvis is right. Unless you’re already an admirer of Miller and think Miller is a journalistic Joan of Arc it’s a highly questionable choice.
Our only advice to PJ Media in an email when it all started was that we felt for it to have maximum credibility it was vital that it should be truly ideologically diverse. Such a site already does exist: one of the finest sites on the Internet: Punditdrome. HIGHLY recommended.
UPDATE: But, clearly, a lot of thought has gone into PJ Media which is clear when you read this.
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.