Professional journalists and "facts"

I saw this today: NYTimes Shocked That People Write Blogs To Respond To Press Inaccuracies and earlier this week I listened to a group of radio columnists and news reporters lamenting blogging as a threat to their profession.

No doubt blogging is a threat to professional journalists. There is also no doubt that blogs can be inaccurate, poorly researched, politically biased and even driven by mob rule.

Yeah? And just how is that different from professional journalism?

Sure, sometimes the traditional press gets it "right". The Watergate investigations of the Nixon era spring to mind. But where were our fact digging "professionals" as we were suckered into the Iraq war? Perhaps that's a little unfair; there were some voices of dissent and at the time the true facts were difficult to determine, but professional media has the same warts and shortcomings as the great unwashed bloggers. This recent ZTechDirt article is just another example.

I've said this before: what I resent most about the established media's disdain of the new media is the patronizing assumption that we, the readers, are too dumb to sift the wheat from the chaff. To hear the professionals tell it, we are all easily misled and bamboozled and need their paternal guidance to determine the value of what we read. Yes, some of the reading public is hopelessly stupid, but they aren't reading anything but the comics and the sports pages anyway. The rest of us should resent this insinuation that we are incapable of judging the value of our news sources.

The New York Times article says:

All these developments have forced journalists to respond in a
variety of ways, including becoming more open about their methods
and techniques and perhaps more conscious of how they filter
information.
 

That's a bad thing? Apparently so:

"To the extent that you know there's someone monitoring every word,
it probably compels you to be even more careful, which is a good
thing," said Chris Bury, the "Nightline" correspondent whose
interview was published by the Discovery Institute. "But readers
and viewers need to realize that one interview is only one part of
the story, that there are other interviews and other research and
that this is just a sliver of what goes into a complete report."
 

In this case I sympathise with Mr. Bury: the Intelligent Design advocates who published the transcript surely are among the unthinking boobs professional journalists are so worried about. But even with my distaste for their stupidity, I don't see that they did anything so horrible: they simply published the transcript verbatim. What's wrong with that?

Quoting from the Times article again:

But the power of blogs is exponential; blog posts can be linked
and replicated instantly across the Web, creating a snowball effect
that often breaks through to the mainstream media. Moreover, blogs
have a longer shelf life than most traditional news media articles.
A newspaper reporter's original article is likely to disappear from
the free Web site after a few days and become inaccessible unless
purchased from the newspaper's archives, while the blogger's version
of events remains available forever.
 

As DV Henkel-Wallace said in the TechDirt link I gave above, "Somehow the Times failed to point out that the one-week limitation is in no way unfair: they choose to take their content offline!". Indeed.

The Times article ends with more patronizing:

Jamie McIntyre, CNN's senior correspondent at the Pentagon, said
the traditional skills of sifting through information and presenting
it in context were especially vital now because there were so many
other sources of information.

"With the Internet, with blogs, with text messages, with soldiers
writing their own accounts from the front lines, so many people
are trying to shape things into their own reality," he said. "I
don't worry so much anymore about finding out every little detail
five minutes before someone else. It's more important that we take
that information and tell you what it means."

Ms. MacKinnon predicted that traditional journalism and the art of
distilling information would not vanish. "Most people don't have
hours and hours every day to read the Web, and they want someone
who can quickly and succinctly tell you what you need to know,"
she said. "But it's great the raw materials can be made available
to those who have the time."
 

Thanks, Jamie, but I think I'm quite capable of determining what things mean. Certainly I appreciate distillations and the opinions of people like you who follow certain areas closely and do have expertise I don't have. But it's a new game: I'm not going to just swallow it all blindly. The Internet and the blogging communities give me the ability to do my own research and to hear other points of view far more easily than I ever could before.

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Mon Sep 21 16:11:10 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Professional journalists are still fretting about bloggers. Recently I read that some big places like NYT are once again considering blocking inbound linking. That stupidity shows their complete lack of understanding - if they want to block us from linking, great: in a few years their sites will be completely irrelevant Internet islands. So, good luck with that is all I have to say!



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