Blogs and the "old media"

Billmon's Los Angeles Times article on blogging has, not surprisingly, attracted a bit of attention in the blogosphere.

But before I blog about blogs and the blogging bloggers who blog them, I want to mention two cartoons, one by August Pollak and one by Tom Tomorrow, poking fun at some of the hype over blogs in the form of "some guy with a Web site."  As the Steve Gilliard post below mentions, there is some reason to say at this point that politcal blogging at least is proportionately more of a "guy thing."

I've found Nick Confessore's comments on the whole blogging phenomenon to be consistently sensible, as in his take on Billmon: "They Were Really Cool Before They Sold Out, Man." 09/27/04

With some exceptions, the most widely read blogs resemble small online magazines or stand-alone op-ed pages more than the proverbial guy-sitting-in-his-living-room. (I would say Kos is the major exception -- his site has become something akin to a 527 with a blog attached.) Every political magazine now operating, for example, started in a manner very similar to how a blog gets started: Someone who had something to say and knew how to write a good sentence decided to get into the game. The major differences are that blogs have a drastically lower barrier to entry, which means more people who might balk at the requirements of starting a full-scale magazine and can get in the game by themselves; most have lower editorial standards (by which I mean, basically, that no one edits them for style, accuracy, and readability); and all have much more direct interaction with their readers. Another way to look at it, which I wouldn't be the first to note, is that blogging is in many ways a return to the early era of American opinion journalism, when newspapers were basically partisan pamphlets with low production values. The point is that blogs are in many respects a new and very interesting variation on an old theme rather than something entirely suigeneris.

Steve Gilliard challenges Billmon's premise that commercialized blogs are inherently deprived of oppositional potential (hey, Marcusean phrasing has something to be said for it!): The party's over 09/27/04.

I wish he wouldn't toss this [expletive deleted] about philosophy around when he should really say he can no longer hack it. Walking away is fine, [expletive deleted] excuses are an insult.

But my main disagreement is that he has confused the medium with the method. Blogs are a method, which can be used by anyone to say anything. There is no rule thatCBS can't useblogs to make their point.

There is no rule that says only men in their 20's and 30's get to run quirky, independent blogs and when other people join that the party is over. It's a tool, a method, not some kind of revolution. Anyone can use it. The revolution, such that it is, is in who gets to play.

It is a GOOD thing Kos can make money from his site. That he doesn't have a boss to pressure. And that his advertisers believe in him. That's a revolution on it's own, but so many people are caught up in this avant guarde, outsider [expletive deleted], that when someone makes money, they're "selling out". Which is the argument of the bitter and immature.

Here's a thought: in America, financial success equals freedom. This idea that only those who go broke are pure is a sad [expletive deleted] joke. I saw so much waste, so much sloppy work in the dotcom era, I would have thought people would have been estatic that a guy in a room can make enough from a blog to support his family, not this crap of some lost ideal of pure commentary.

I don't want to waste too much time on either the media navel-gazing over the CBS Killian documents flap, or on the narcissistic self-congratulations of the blogosphere over the same.

But it is rapidly turning into an iconic example of the media dysfunction that is literally crippling the functioning of democracy in the United States.

Consider this piece: The News Keeps Getting Worse for Embarrassed CBS by Elizabeth Jensen and James Rainey Los Angeles Times 09/22/04.  This really struck it home to me what a serious press dysfuntion we're experiencing in the US:

CBS television officials struggled Tuesday with revelations that the network's news programs not only failed to report thoroughly on memos involving President Bush's Vietnam-era military service, but then committed an apparent ethical lapse by helping a top advisor to Sen. John F. Kerry contact a source for that controversial report.

Several journalism analysts said CBS News producer Mary Mapes' phone call to Kerry senior advisor Joe Lockhart amounts to at least a potential conflict of interest — giving the appearance that the network had assisteda candidate in the presidential race.

I'll freely admit that when I first hear about this, I didn't think it was such a big deal.  Journalists and politicians talk to each other all the time, and it didn't strike me as anything that significant if Burkett had said to Mapes, "I'd really like to talk to someone from the Kerry campaign, who should I call?" and she responded by calling someone at the campaign and said, "Hey, I was just interviewing this guy Burkett for a story and he said he really wanted to talk to somebody at the campaign."

Now, it didn't take much reflection to realize that in traditional journalistic ethics, this was at best an action in the "gray area" of ethics; it will be interesting to see what results and conclusions CBS' promised independent investigation turns up. 

Both Nick Confessore and Kevin Drum recommend this take on the "Killian documents" incident: Breaking the News, Then Becoming It by Tina Brown Washington Post 09/23/04.

The New York Times betrayed the passive-aggressive guilt complex that lingers after the Jayson Blair fabrications by playing the CBS story above the fold on Tuesday's front page and the beheading of an American hostage in Baghdad below the fold, at the bottom. A Manhattan news factory screwed up big time -- and it wasn't us! Will Dan lose his job? That's the big news. An American hostage losing his life -- that's the small news.

Journalists the length and breadth of the land publicly beat up on Dan, but privately -- even in the capital of schadenfreude -- they were not as gleeful as you might expect. Every editor, producer and reporter knows that the warp speed of the news cycle means we are all only one step ahead of some career-ending debacle. But still the panic to beat the competition trumps every other concern. Reports this month that Fox News had surpassed the other networks' ratings with its GOP convention coverage only inflamed the terror of mounting obsolescence. ...

Fear of missing the bandwagon is behind all the hype about the brilliance of bloggers who blew the whistle. You'd think "Buckhead," who first spotted the flaws in the documents, is the cyberworld's Woodward and Bernstein. Now the conventional wisdom is that the media will be kept honest and decent by an army of incorruptible amateur gumshoes. In fact, cyberspace is populated by a coalition of political obsessives and pundits on speed who get it wrong as much as they get it right. It's just that they type so much they are bound to nail a story from time to time.

While there may be more than a hint of "old media" defensiveness in that, she's right about what happened in this case.  Spurred by partisan hints, conservative bloggers started tossing mud-balls about the dubious nature of the documents.  In one sense, some of it stuck.  But before this whole thing enters that nebulous statement where events are transsubstantiated into conventional wisdom, it's worth remembering that the hole in CBS' story, the place where they fell down in their professional reporting, was in accepting documents from a less-than-totally-solid source (Bill Burkett) and failing to establish a good provanance (chain of possession) for the documents.

Those were not the issues raised by the rightwing bloggers.  And the early amateur attempts at document-debunking in this case didn't stand up more than a day or two at a time: the "th"-superscript, the claim that the type face wasn't available in 1972, etc.

David Neiwert expands on that point at his blog: Consequences 10/03/04.

The blogosphere, really, has the potential to be a great innovation in American journalism. As I've argued previously, it represents in many ways the democratization of journalism, the ability of voices of all kinds to participate in the sharing and distribution of information that might otherwise be choked out by the bottleneck that mainstream media have become over the past decade and longer.

But there's an important caveat to all that: If bloggers want to act as journalists, they need to conform to basic journalistic standards. Or they will, in the end, pay for it.

Part of what Neiwert touches on here is the fact that political bloggers are a diverse group, and some are more careful than others.  In connection with that, we shouldn't forget that professional journalists do use their blogs to post interviews and sometimes information gathered from their reporting that may not be available elsewhere.  And blogs do have the ability to break stories that can have wider signficance.  See Steve Clemons' The Washington Note of 09/26/04 for an example.

Finally, Duncan Black (Atrios) has a particularly good comment responding to the Billmon piece in the Los Angeles Times: Blogging about Blogging 09/27/04.  He reminisces about the ancient history of blogging (2-3 years ago) when Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds was (Duncan's take) the arbiter of the political blogosphere and hadn't yet come out of the closet as such a Bush partisan.  He also includes this useful observation:

Popular bloggers either a) post a lot, b) have a unique/funny/interesting take on things, c) have been around awhile, d) a combination of a)-c) with a) being the most important. That's just the way it is. Figure out how you can fit into that. Most blogs don't derive their popularity from their "authority," and those that do usually are by people with some credentials. Simply expressing opinions without advancing any kind of new argument isn't a way to differentiate yourself. What I mean is that people may go to DeLong for economics (yes, I'm an economist, but I've never tried to establish myself as an authority here on the blog), and Volokh or Balkin for Law, but I don't think people come to this site for my opinion on issue "X." My take on it, yes, but not simply for "does Atrios think it is good or bad?" because my "authority" as an opinionshaper has any weight. If there's little reason for your opinion to carry some weight, then your opinion isn't going to be enough.