Good article in the Sunday Magazine for the Times on the actual way political bloggers function in reality as evidenced by the RNC. It’s hard to imagine political bloggers existing without the resource of establishment journalism. David would have stayed a shepard without Goliath. The basic argument about political bloggers is that their lack of unrealistic ethical principles and greater numbers in comparison to journalists, and skillful use of the web make them the more democratic alternative to the traditional, and increasingly elitist journalist. The blogger is such a better beast than the journalist, some speculate that one day soon the poli-blogger may even replace the aging “Dan Rather” journalist world.
I like the idea of blogging as a type of political revolution, and it definitely has changed the nature of this presidential campaign. It’s also seems more “democratic” to take the power of informing the populace about politics away from a couple dozen professionals and putting it into people that are concerned about politics on a level of principle. Plus, the fact that journalists always show some kind of bias annoys me. However, I find that I question the previous argument on almost every level.
While they are tedious, I find that the artificial neutrality of journalists is preferable to the unabashed slander, malice, and ranting of the strongly partisan political blogger. Political blogging, at least in tone, harkens back to the days of muck-racking and yellow journalism. Instead of fictitious illustrations, we now have adobe photoshop.
As for the open bias, while it is refreshing if you have a chip on your shoulder about the liberal (or conservative) bias of journalism, I fail to see the actual informative value. In other words, blatant bias is entertaining, soothing, but unhelpful.
While there are certainly greater numbers of people blogging on politics than there are journalists writing about politics. I am not sure that there are dramatically more bloggers doing original work on politics, than there are journalists doing the same. For every Instapundit or Wonkette, there are 10,000+ blogs that a bare handful of people read (like mine) that are little more than journals cut with a dash of personal vanity.
One of the lasting contributions of poli-bloggers will be their demonstration of the value of the Internet as a campaigning tool as well as the value of the Internet as a research tool. In 2006 you can rest assured that both sides of the aisle will use blogs as a means to generate buzz for candidates. But this is not journalism. People have been swept up in the multiple, diverse ways that blogs have been utilized this campaign season, and lumped them into the separate issue of blogs as the scourge/substitute of traditional journalism. Furthermore, while bloggers have broken big stories by doing untraditional research (like googling everything), these methods are going to be appropriated by journalists with time.
Bloggers are not going to replace journalists. Any revolution resulting in the annihilation of professional journalists would be bad. A world without journalists is not a world more free. Rather, you would have a world where information could be so unmediated that information would stop being useful. There is a sense where journalists are valued because there are few of them, because they are elite. After all, you can have too much democracy. There is a reason that we don’t just have a set-top box on our TVs, where we can watch CSPAN, and then vote for every piece of legislation introduced on the floor of Congress.
All that being said, blogs, especially political ones, are incredibly useful things. If the political blog turns out to be a fad(which I highly doubt) of the world of news, that would be a shame, for several reasons.
One of the best examples of bloggers outdoing journalists comes from Rathergate. For those of you not familiar with the story, CBS News anchor Dan Rather broke a story casting doubt on the truth of claims president Bush had made about his National Guard service. Conservative bloggers, through researching the story, found the documents to be fakes. Here is a shining example of the use of blogs for the world of news. The bloggers were able to shame the establishment journalists for not having a more rigorous commitment to research, and in no small part this was due to their outsider status from the journalist world. After all, it’s hard to imagine a journalist at ABC News researching the authenticity of the font of the typewriter used to type the document. After all the ABC journalist probably wouldn’t go into that detail for a story of her own, so she probably wouldn’t think it fair to expect others to fact-check with that degree of detail.
While I doubt that a blogger, given those National Guard records would have gone into that degree of fact-checking, that isn’t the point. Bloggers have nothing better to do, so they will, and the public is well served. However, here, we see a great example of the bloggers acting as a check, but not a substitute to journalists. This is one of the great assets that the blogger has, their niche is for the details.
Interestingly bloggers blessed status as outsiders is constantly being put in jeopardy with success. Bloggers, especially the ones that get read by as many people a day as traditional news sources, are on the verge of not being outsiders. As soon as this elite of the blogging world, become financially attached to establishment journalism, or formally politically connected to the major political parties (not necessarily individual candidates) they will become worse than journalists. As the Times article linked above shows, this is already happening. After all, these are only people, they desire wealth, fame and power just like the next person. A blogger making tens of thousands a year to report news about politics, from an openly democratic, or republican point of view is a propagandist.
Now, I don’t mean to use that term as a bad word. Propaganda existed before the fascists, and before the communists, our founding fathers used it well. In fact, the church has always been really good at propaganda. Propaganda only refers to material circulated to the public that is intended to propagate an opinion. Perhaps because we don’t have an outlet for propaganda in our country (besides campaign ads) political blogs are taking that place.
Plus, I would argue being able to live both as both a blogger and a journalist, would make the calling of journalism easier, the heavy load of objectivity lighter. I would imagine that being able to let off “steam” about politics on your blog, would help you keep editorializing out of your journalism.
It is a credit to our society that we have a profession where that professions stated mission is to report events as they happen, to provide mere facts open to interpretation for those who were not able to be there when it happened. Is this realistic? I don’t know. Is it admirable? Yes. Do we need both journalists and bloggers? Definitely.
Posted by matt at September 27, 2004 2:33 PM | TrackBackAn observation: when mass journalism was in its infancy, we had yellow journalism. Blogging is now in its infancy, and we get Indymedia and the Daily Kos. I think that given a bit of time, the system will correct itself. There weren'y any formal rules made to correct yellow journalism, IIRC. It just took the public getting sick of important people making shit up.
I forsee a symbiotic relationship for journalism and blogging in the future. In short, I think that the reporting aspect of journalism will be entirely absorbed by the blogosphere. It will become the place where people go to find facts. That's what bloggers are good at: finding and presenting facts as close as can reasonably be expected to the way they are in themselves.
Journalists, on the other hand, are where people will eventually turn for interpretation, and more important, integration of those facts.
Anybody can fisk a press release. Anybody can do the legwork to prove that a docment was produced in MS Word. Not everybody can take a data set full of incomplete, apparently contradictory, and highly technical facts and present a clear picture of what's going on in the world. That takes skill. That takes education. That takes time and dedication. But unless you're willing and able to do all of that yourself - and most people fail at one or both of those - then you need someone to do it for you. Enter journalists, stage left.
That's where I think things are headed. It isn't unbiased. In fact, it's deliberately biased. So we get a multitude of tiny voices presenting essentially the same set of data for everyone's perusal. Then we get a few, clear voices interpreting that data. These voices will bring a clearly stated vision to the table, and you can listen to the voices you happen to like.
Posted by: ryan at September 27, 2004 5:38 PMIt is going to be really interesting to see how the symbiosis between bloggers and journalists works out. I don't expect to see blogging to become any less partisan or subjective. In therms of structure, rules, and authority, it has far less than journalism. My best hope is that people who are journalists can moonlight as people who blog, hopefully allowing them to channel more of their personal feelings into their blog, less in their journalism.
Posted by: matt at September 28, 2004 8:36 AM