What's wrong with American journalism? (1)
I am taking the opportunity of a piece of news about the Drudge report to begin a series of short articles on American journalism (one posting every three days). My meeting with Danny Schechter, the editor of mediachannel.org, also gave me the idea of comparing journalism in Europe and America. I will obviously be making postings out of Paris, and hope my selection will be appreciated as a European's interpretation of the American scene.
Let me begin with this remark by Rich Ord, Webpronews: "According to Google Zeitgeist, the internet based Drudge Report is the third most searched for news source as of October, 2004. Why is this interesting? Of the top sites searched for news sources, the Drudge Report (DR) is the only Web based news service. It is significant that online news sources are now mainstream news sources when using pure popularity as the barometer. All of the others in the top five are principally television based. The Google Zeitgeist list of most popular news sources is as follows: CNN, Today Show, Drudge Report, Fox News, MSNBC..."
What is amazing about this piece of news is that very few people seem to be worried: it is now part of the American media landscape - as wonkette.com or other opinion blogs - and relatively well accepted, even if the parent/child relationship between DR and its baby-blogs can be discussed or denied (seen from Europe, there is no doubt it exists). Organisations with hundreds of journalists - and skilled people and a long tradition of fact-checking - are now put on the same level as a single person. But nobody seems to care! Isn't important when rumours and second-hand commentaries become as important as breaking news and investigative reports? And ironically, during the presidential elections, major American newspapers were almost obliged to follow the lead set by opinionated weblogs: de facto, their agenda was driven by this new cast of opinion leaders.
The second point is the apparent lack of courage among many American editors (due to media-political correctness?): the only one who reacted to this new trend was John S. Carroll, LA Times editor in a prophetic lecture entitled "The Wolf in Reporter's Clothing: the Rise of Pseudo-Journalism in America" (targeting Fox News talk-shows but a lot of his examples could be applied to opinionated blogs). What does this editors' self-censorship mean? That today blogs are so popular that nobody dares say that Drudge's sons of the blogosphere raise as many problems as they bring solutions. I know that American editors aren't pro-blogs, but I'm still waiting for a strong editorial saying that blogs are not the corner stone of 21st century journalism...
What's the main issue for European journalists in this American blogmania tsunami? Usually, the information process can be divided into four segments (fact-checking being part of the two first segments): breaking news, investigative reporting, balanced analysis and then opinion. With the bloggers, you jump directly from breaking news to the opinion article. This is a major disruption and, by the way, a major misunderstanding of what journalism is: when you are articulated and well informed, it's rather easy to become an opinion giver, but it is much more difficult to fact-check the news and avoid manipulation by the government or big companies and interests. You need staff, a newsroom, and what has existed in media organisations from a century. Period.
I am, by now, perfectly aware of bloggers' arguments regarding the CBS affair concerning the "60 minutes" report about George W. Bush National Guard service. It is said that, thanks to the "guys in pajamas", truth emerged very quickly. To be frank, I'm not fully convinced. For the following reason: CBS' competitors would have done the same job, criticizing the sources and the conclusions as they usually do. But it would have taken days and days. What is really new is that, as a case study, the collective intelligence of the blog community did the work in a few hours. It is now impossible to re-write the story as if bloggers didn't exist, but as far as we are concerned in Europe, the blog issue is only a question of timing, not a question of principle. Bloggers, in this sense, are part of the journalistic community. As potential contributors and as accelerators - as opinion makers as well -, not as editors or truth makers!
Another worrying issue is what could be called "American demagogy" or the "Zagat culture" and I will develop that in another posting. The syllogism is the following: blogs are popular, blogs are worthy - instead of so-called MSM or mainstream media -, so blogs give you the truth! In France, you don't say a restaurant is good because it is full and seems successful. First, you try the food and second you let pass time to see if the promises are kept in the following months. So, it is not because you have 12 million monthly visitors on Dailykos.com that it is a good site. It's certainly a successful blog, but beyond that it reveals a crisis in American public opinion. I see it as a symptom, not a cure! Sorry if it is a bit tough, but there is no reason to accept any "religion of figures" based on the audience of some weblogs: so far, fairness and accuracy were not indexed on Technorati technology! It's more or less the same story about the "We Media" concept and we will discuss that later in "What's wrong with American journalism? (2)".
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End frog commentary, start dirtboy commentary:
I am, by now, perfectly aware of bloggers' arguments regarding the CBS affair concerning the "60 minutes" report about George W. Bush [sic] National Guard service. It is said that, thanks to the "guys in pajamas", truth emerged very quickly. To be frank, I'm not fully convinced. For the following reason: CBS' competitors would have done the same job, criticizing the sources and the conclusions as they usually do. But it would have taken days and days. What is really new is that, as a case study, the collective intelligence of the blog community did the work in a few hours. It is now impossible to re-write the story as if bloggers didn't exist, but as far as we are concerned in Europe, the blog issue is only a question of timing, not a question of principle.
He just doesn't get it. We do it not only faster but better. We have a tremendous pool of knowledge at our disposal. And we are not bound by the dictates of editors - we don't have to please the boss, just make our case to other freepers in the course of vetting a story. It is a highly democratic process where the best research and the most thought-through opinion survives.
It appears that Mr. Pecquerie has failed to do any fact-checking before making this claim. If a blogger wants to be reputable, he checks his facts. And on a site like FR, hundreds of people may be involved in validating an article, literally in realtime - and then the facts and theories are exhaustively debated by equals, instead of what happens in many newspapers where there is a pecking order and a need to please the boss.
Back in the dim, dark recesses of my educational background I dredged up the criteria that newspapers then used for their ratings. It was call Audit Bureau of Circulation or ABC. Its logo was a black hexagon with the letters ABC in white. Its sole purpose was to monitor the number of copies sold for each issue of the paper. By analogy, then the number of hits on a blog would indeed be a viable measure of its circulation and therefore of its effect on public thinking.
Curious. What is a truth maker?