Some liberal bloggers are trying to link up with media outlets so their point of view is better represented — a sign both blogs will have an increasing influence on media coverage decisions.
But first, some perspective:
In all of my time working in the traditional the media I never heard reporters or editors saying: “Hey, let’s run this story to help Candidate X and hurt candidate Y.” They picked a story to find out what happened and if it became big they didn’t stop reporting it until they ran out of follow up stories or the competition stopped reporting it. And, yes, that might not be what an official or candidate wanted. But it was looking into and covering a story that popped up.
Op-Ed writers were a different animal. They took issues and reported it from a perspective, and you could almost always guess their ideological stance in advance. It was no secret. And they were hired for their political views as opinion writers.
The bloggers here walk a very a fine-line because part of what they’re saying sounds like they are like op-ed writers or political party activists. The fact is: news stories shouldn’t be done because they help or hurt someone on the left or right but because they are news stories. Blogtopia is polarized. The New York Times piece notes:
Even as online pundits criticize traditional news organizations as slow, biased and technologically challenged, a group of bloggers is trying to use old-fashioned telephone conference calls to share their ideas with newspaper and television journalists.
The bloggers, who describe themselves as liberal or progressive, say the conference calls are intended to counter what they regard as the much stronger influence of conservative pundits online. Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, the host of the two calls so far, views them as a step toward getting their reports out to mainstream news organizations.
There’s nothing wrong with self-promo, of course. More:
Mr. Fertik maintains that the blurring of boundaries has benefited left-wing bloggers less than their adversaries on the right, saying that reports posted on conservative blogs more easily make the jump to the main news media. “The way we perceive it,” he said, “is that right-wing bloggers are able to invent stories, get them out on Drudge, get them on Rush Limbaugh, get them on Fox, and pretty soon that spills over into the mainstream media. We, the progressives, we don’t have that kind of network to work with.
But bloggers on all sides agree that the left has made less effective use of the opportunities to organize and wield influence afforded by the Internet. The reasons, though, are more complex than they might appear. “It’s not just a story about the blogosphere,” said Jack M. Balkin, a professor and director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. “It’s a story about the conservative social networks of which the blogosphere is a part. The important thing is the network – and I mean the social network.”
The story cites the growth of Powerline and Free Republic. Yale’s Balkin notes that a blog influence grows by links: others willing to link to a site with similar views to drive up the traffic.
On the other hand, the subject that the story says was discussed does NOT bode well for the liberal bloggers. It’s a story that has gained little traction in the media and even among some key Democrats:
It is probably too early to tell how successful the conference calls have been, although Mr. Fertik said that the audio recording of the first call had been downloaded some 2,000 times. During the second call, held last Tuesday, Brad Friedman, who runs bradblog.com, discussed his investigation into accusations of rigged electronic voting machines – a contentious subject that drew questions from listeners, mostly other bloggers.
There’s nothing wrong with this, of course. It stands to reason if GOP blogs are touting the blogosphere’s new power and the role many conservative blogs played in CBS Dan Rather’s and CNN’s Eason Jordan’s early retirements then liberal blogs will want to ensure that stories they are working on such as the Jeff Gannon controversy and allegations about voting are covered.
But the danger is: if there’s a clamor to do a story considered by editors and reporters to be “way out there,” credibility is shot. And lost credibility is very hard for a news source to recover in the newsroom — bloggers included.
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, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.