Another Open Letter to Jeanne d’Arc

Posted on April 30, 2003 in Blogging Crosstalk

This quote from your blog caught my eye:

I could have written yesterday’s column, as could the majority of people on the blogroll to the right. All it required was an ability to read the newspapers and tell the truth. Blogs wouldn’t exist (or at least no one would read them) unless there was an unmet need for people who can dig around in a few news sources and tell the truth — but shouldn’t we expect more from a paper that has the enormous resources of the New York Times?

Before I read your entry, I threw in my own two cents on the matter at Pax Nortona in response to another report about journalists’ perceptions of what blogging is all about. You raise good questions about the intents and purposes of journalism and make a fair distinction between blogs and traditional media. I’ve likened them to the difference between letters and newsprint. We shouldn’t be expecting the one to behave like the other.

But what you said about Krugman (and just about every other news media-owned pundit out there) hit me in a different way: I am failing to see how the resources of a newspaper, how editing is saving us from shallow coverage. In some ways, editing may result in less accuracy, less in depth coverage because it demands that work be produced to meet a deadline and is reluctant print any facts that can’t be checked with usually suspect sources like governments and business associations.

We must remember that journalism is a thing that lives not for the truth first, but for the bottom line. Blogs live for the egos of the writers, I dare say, but with the abundance of freedom in expression out there, there are plenty of people performing checks and balances on what everyone else writes to allow readers to sift out the truth. For this reason, I dare say that blogs have done a better job than “free” media outlets here in the United States of seeing past the propaganda and — if not providing definitive answers — asking the good questions that our members of the Fourth Estate should be answering.

Thanks to the recent PBS coverage of blogging, many of us have found ourselves asking “What is blog?” We’re told by journa-pundits that they’re better because they have editing and we don’t. But as Jeremy Puma points out

most of the authors of popular blogs are intelligent enough to act as editors *and* authors (and publishers and advertising departments, for that matter).

The principal criticism that journalists make against blogs suffers from a purblindness: it assumes that groupthink is always better than one person thinking alone. What it fails to consider, however, is that decision making in news media organizations is often hierarchical: a group may collect and gather the information, but the decision of what is and isn’t newsworthy often belongs to one person. The process of digestion that a piece must undergo in a news organization often robs it of the vitality of the ideas and the ring of truth as various agents do their thing to check (or not check) “facts”, to “dumb things down” so that the audience may “better understand” them, and decide “what is the news”.

I respect the right of news organizations to function as units and to act as centralized distributors of information. But every center point needs forces on the edges controlling its spin. It’s best that these forces come at the problem of information from other angles, that they do not suffer the restrictions inherent in working for an advertiser’s dollar, and that they stand their place in the forum where ideas are advanced, tested, and challenged by the mind of the body politic.

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This whole issue of what blogging is about is worth talking about. I’m for discussion towards defining and expressing why we do it. Let’s not let the media whores manage us.