Blogs and journalism
Following Jonathon and Burningbird, I want to add a note or two to the emerging blogcerto on journalism.
Burningbird:
In our weblogs, we hold to our own moral code of what we consider responsible writing; we can say what we think and feel, issuing compliment or slander with impunity and disregard for consequences.
If you’re Burningbird, a footloose contractor, this may be true, to a limited extent. No blogger has been sued for libel yet; I know it’s going to happen one of these days. Might even be me; I am good at saying the wrong thing the wrong way. (Or even the right thing the wrong way.)
Life is even harsher in the workin’-for-Da-Man world, as Mark and Heather can attest. Da Man worries about what his employees say about him, about his industry, and about the larger world, and he is not shy about asserting his power over those employees to pull their words into the company line or silence them altogether. Consequences? Oh yeah. Big ones.
Burningbird again:
The Journalist, though, is held not only to their own code, but to their editor’s, their publication’s, their peers’, the code of the law, and, ultimately, their readers’ codes. And if they slander without fact, they risk loss of respect, at best, and a lawsuit at worst. If they tell only half the story, they are condemned and censured when the full truth is told.
I’m not clear on how most of this is not true of bloggers, myself. Aside from the lack of a formal blogger code, that is. If I accuse Burningbird of bribing Jonathon with links in return for cookies, and it ain’t so, I am ever so going to hear about it. Perhaps my blog would survive the uproar. Perhaps not. I haven’t seen a big enough blog dustup to be sure what would happen. In any case, I do have editors and a larger publication, in a sense: my fellow bloggers, and the blogsphere.
As for weblogging and bias, which Burningbird goes on to talk about—I happen to believe that “objectivity” is a myth. I prefer open admission of bias to a pretense of non-bias. In that sense, I’ll take an honest blogger over a journalist any day; because of the objectivity myth, the journalist cannot admit to bias even if s/he wants to or should. (Possibly this has something to do with why some journalists are blogging. Their blogs aren’t hobbled by the objectivity myth; they can be up-front about where they’re really coming from.)
Jonathon asks why on earth we would want to be journalists, when doing journalism right practically involves submerging ourselves in our subjects, and when doing journalism wrong is such a crock? (True story: My husband got interviewed on a local news channel the day LotR: FotR came out. The interviewer begged him to tell her what to ask, as she had never read the books, hadn’t paid any attention to the movie, and had no idea what he had actually done for New Line, despite two articles on him in local newspapers!)
Other bloggers seem to want to call themselves editorialists, to duck the question of their relationship with what they write about. I’m not wholly convinced, myself. The whole question seems to rest on mediation. The journalist is the mediator between the subject and the readers. The journalist is theoretically outside of the subject—I say theoretically because, as Jonathon’s movie anecdote demonstrates, the best journalists really are involved—and that outsiderdom either creates some value by itself, or is necessary because the insiders can’t or won’t write themselves.
Now that you think about it, though, isn’t this rather a strange sort of system?
Insiders can and do write, these days, when Da Man isn’t looking or has been de-fanged somehow. I write ebooks because I used to live them. I write markup because I live it. You guys know that about me by now; you know what subjects I am a worthwhile source on. I would no more go to Jonathon for RDF advice than Burningbird for insights on Japanese literature.
Rather than the appearance of non-bias created in part by the journalist’s outsider status, we have a multiplicity of available viewpoints whose bias is either stated outright or can be gathered from archive perusal. (Or both. I try to record my biases, but I can never be sure I’ve remembered all the pesky things.)
The usual gesture at this point, I believe, is to ask rhetorically what we need journalists and media news outlets for anyway. I dunno, for a shortcut when I don’t know who the right bloggers for a particular subject of interest are? For discovery of topics I would not normally search out? For topics that for whatever reason don’t have bloggers? For those times when I really do value the outsider (or even naive) perspective?
Blogging will change journalism, certainly, but so did the telegraph. Like Jonathon, I don’t see much point in playing zero-sum games with journalism and blogging. Unlike him, I confess to an eagerness to take over some of journalism’s role as mediator between subjects and readers—only a few subjects, mind you, and I daresay only a few readers!—as well as a wild curiosity to see how the journalistic establishment reacts to all this.
(I thought about majoring in journalism as a youngster. I really did.)