When a new medium appears it’s not unusual for the smug, old medium to need a hard lesson in the new reality — hence the saying “strike a happy medium” — and BOY is this evident in a piece by Adam Cohen in the New York Times.
The piece is titled The Latest Rumbling in the Blogosphere: Questions About Ethics but it could perhaps more accurately be titled The Latest Rumbling In the Mainstream Media: Continued Misunderstanding About The Nature of Blogs and Bloggers.
The irony is this: We AGREE with some of Cohen’s points about bloggers needing to live up to standards they demand of others. In fact, you can read a great post on this subject by Pennywit here and my somewhat general comments posted on Dean’s World here.
But Cohen’s piece — which does attempt to be thoughtful — is so riddled with misunderstanding and generalizations about the nature of blogs and bloggers, where can we begin? Perhaps by going through most of it point by point. SO:
Bloggers like to demonize the MSM (that’s Mainstream Media), but it is increasingly hard to think of the largest news blogs as being outside the mainstream. Bloggers have been showing up at national political conventions, at the World Economic Forum at Davos and on the cover of Business Week.
That still doesn’t make them members of the mainstream media. As someone who worked in the media, there is sort of a “new toy fascination” by print and broadcast media. Something new is out there and everyone wants to cover it — because it’s new and everyone is covering it. That does NOT make that thing PART OF IT.
He then notes some of the bloggers successes in stirring up the pot on various stories. Then he writes this:
The thing about influence is that, as bloggers well know, it is only a matter of time before people start trying to hold you accountable. Bloggers are so used to thinking of themselves as outsiders, and watchdogs of the LSM (that’s Lame Stream Media), that many have given little thought to what ethical rules should apply in their online world. Some insist that they do not need journalistic ethics because they are not journalists, but rather activists, or humorists, or something else entirely. But more bloggers, and blog readers, are starting to ask whether at least the most prominent blogs with the highest traffic shouldn’t hold themselves to the same high standards to which they hold other media.
Fair enough. It IS a question. There are certain blogs on the right and left that I will read because even though they are packed with opinion, they make an effort to ground it in fact. They truly seem to care and aren’t simply spin. There are others that name call. And then there are those that sneer at the mainstream media, claiming that all reporters are dumb and that only bloggers have the wisdom. We skip those.
So you can see we would normally be sympathetic to Cohen. But:
When errors are discovered or pointed out by internal or external sources, they must be corrected. And there should be a clear wall between editorial content and advertising.
No problem there…
Bloggers often invoke these journalistic standards in criticizing the MSM, and insist on harsh punishment when they are violated. The blogs that demanded Dan Rather’s ouster accused him of old-school offenses: not sufficiently checking the facts about President Bush’s National Guard service, refusing to admit and correct errors, and having undisclosed political views that shaded the journalism. Eason Jordan, CNN’s chief news executive, resigned this year after a blogmob attacked him for a reported statement at the World Economic Forum at Davos that the military had aimed at journalists in Iraq and killed 12 of them. Their complaint was even more basic than in Mr. Rather’s case: they were upset that Mr. Jordan said something they believed to be untrue.
Sorry. He misses the point. Part of it was that Jordan made a statement as a bigwig of CNN that was a generalization with no confirmation. It wasn’t just about whether people BELIEVED it was true. He — a top news executive — offered no supporting information for a highly grave, sensational charge that was a generalization.
But Mr. Rather’s and Mr. Jordan’s misdeeds would most likely not have landed them in trouble in the world of bloggers, where few rules apply. Many bloggers make little effort to check their information, and think nothing of posting a personal attack without calling the target first – or calling the target at all. They rarely have procedures for running a correction.
We’ve seen blogs run corrections. Sometimes it’s in the form of an UPDATE. OR a new post. Yes, there WAS an instance recently of ONE BLOG that almost had to be dragged kicking and screaming to admit it made a mistake — and even when it did that it went on the attack against the mainstream media. But most people will run an UPDATE with new info. Also:
Blogging is basically op-ed writing. He hasn’t Mr. Cohen figured that out YET?
Does Ann Coulter call everyone she criticizes for a comment?
Does Maureen Dowd?
The wall between their editorial content and advertising is often nonexistent. (Wonkette, a witty and well-read Washington blog, posts a weekly shout-out inside its editorial text to its advertisers, including partisan ones like Democrats.org.) And bloggers rarely disclose whether they are receiving money from the people or causes they write about.
REPREHENSIBLE. You can see by this piece that the writer doesn’t like blogs and bloggers. Could he kindly detail the huge conflicts of interests that bloggers on the right AND left have — with all this secret money? We openly display BLOGADS on THIS SITE (and thank you to our advertisers!)
A few bloggers have begun calling for change. There have even been fledgling attempts to create ethical guidelines, like the ones found at Cyberjournalist.net. Defenders of the status quo argue that ethics rules are not necessary in the blogosphere because truth emerges through “collaboration,” and that bias and conflicts of interest are rooted out by “transparency.” But “collaboration” is a haphazard way of defending against dishonesty and slander, and blogs are actually not all that transparent. MSM journalists write under their own names. Someone would be likely to notice if a newspaper reporter covering a campaign was also on the campaign’s staff. But it is hard to know who many bloggers are, and whether they are paid to take the positions they are espousing.
Actually MY name is Jeff Gannon…I just thought “Joe Gandelman” was a nice, easy to remember pen name.
Many bloggers who criticize the MSM’s ethics, however, are in the anomalous position of holding themselves to lower standards, or no standards at all.
He uses “many” so you can’t put a number on it. However, in our emails with bloggers — note we have big and small blogs on our blogroll — 99 percent of them have STANDARDS. Perhaps they cannot live up to the perfection of Mr. Cohen, but they try to produce the best material they can within their ever-developing talents.
Bloggers may need to institutionalize ethics policies to avoid charges of hypocrisy. But the real reason for an ethical upgrade is that it is the right way to do journalism, online or offline. As blogs grow in readers and influence, bloggers should realize that if they want to reform the American media, that is going to have to include reforming themselves.
BOTTOM LINE: He has some good points but (a)this is one more mainstream media column sneering at these uppity non-paid people called bloggers who are getting people to read them without jumping through all these corporate hoops and having to get journalism degrees, (b)he generalizes about blogs, (c)he does not seem to understand what blogs ARE.
Note that TMV has his own high horse (mainly because he is five foot two) which is that most bloggers (including him) don’t use the new medium’s full potential. Blogs SHOULD do more on the spot posts and interviews — not just extended op-ed pieces (like this).
But perhaps Mr. Cohen could get a better idea of blogs if he does one thing: visit The Moderate Voice each day and each day go through a few of the links on our blogroll until you’ve gone through them all.
Then see if the bulk of bloggers are as irresponsible as you suggest — with no standards. We suspect there are one or two who bugged Mr. Cohen and he generalized his comments to all or most blogs. A cool way to vent, but not quite accurate.
He really should hold himself to higher standards than that.
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.