Posted on 08/20/2007 10:02:06 AM PDT by John Jorsett
The late Christopher Lasch once wrote that public affairs generally and journalism in particular suffered not from too little information but from entirely too much. What was needed, he argued, was robust debate. Lasch, a historian by training but a cultural critic by inclination, was writing in 1990, when the Internet was not yet a part of everyday life and bloggers did not exist.
Bloggers now are everywhere among us, and no one asks if we don't need more full-throated advocacy on the Internet. The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.
And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. "No man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, "ever wrote but for money." Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post -- are insistent partisans in political debate. Some reject the label "journalist," associating it with what they contemptuously call MSM (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of "citizen journalist" dedicated to broader democratization.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
So was it a blog or a “fact-finding” reporter who caught NASA’s Y2K climate data bug this month?
Opinions in dinosaur media no substitute for fact-finding of bloggers.
Opinions on weblogs equal or superior to opinions of reporters masquerading as facts.
Sentiments of We the People far more important than narrow agenda of self-appointed "guardians."
They (UPI in this case) can’t even get a simple press release right...
See posting #4 here....
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1883876/posts
Ouch, as Instapundit would say.
“Patient fact-finding.”
Gotta love it...
... The news media and the cops get it all wrong anew, of course, with a flurry of misinformation coupled with public alarming conjecture that is just plan wrong. Be sure to click on the video clip near the bottom and check out the fem reporter's assisting in the misinformational, alarmist campaign. She said Hahn was stealing the smoke detectors to get the lithium batteries in an attempt to make uranium. Stupid lady.... WRONGO. She further says that in 1994 the young, teenage Hahn accumulated so much radioactive materials in his mothers home that it had to be torn down. WRONGO again, dear lady! You get an "F" on your science and an "F" on telling the truth, but a big ole A+++ for journalistic, alarmist, paranoia mongering. ...
Sku(m)be is pwn3d.
The MSM has adopted the new meme for MSM, “responsible journalism”.
IF you get paid to publish in the dinosaur media then you are a “responsible journalist”.
Any post 1950 tech is Irresponsible journalism.
These guys probably protested photography.
Granted. But are the opinions of reporters, mingled with facts, more or less pernicious than some blogger's rant?
The Journalism that Bloggers Actually DoOne of the examples he uses may be slightly familiar to y'all:
By Jay RosenBlowback! That's what you're in for when a great American newspaper runs a Sunday opinion piece as irretrievably lame as "Blogs: All the noise that fits" by Michael Skube (Aug. 19). Skube is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning author who teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina.
In 2005, he wrote a similar column for the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C. There he made fun of the "evangelical fervor that attends blogging," and suggested that bloggers were people who didn't have normal lives, or children. "I don't know many people who have time to read blogs," he wrote. "None of my neighbors do."
There was a darker theme. "I find myself doing something in my journalism class that gives me considerable unease." What was it?" ...discussing that often truculent tribe that calls itself bloggers." That students wanted to talk about blogs as journalism filled him with craft-dread.
Notice that not having time to read them didn't prevent Skube from writing about blogs, which could be considered odd behavior for a college professor. (We're supposed to read a lot, then write.)...
Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper man, calls it "journalistic malpractice." And it is that. Also pedagogical buffoonery. In Skube's columns, there’s a teacher who doesn't believe in doing his homework -- any homework.
So I did it for him. I asked friends in the blogosphere to help me put together a list of examples that would confound Skube if he knew of them, but possibly interest his students. Blog sites doing exactly what he says blog sites don’t do: "the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence ... the depiction of real life."
September 2004. Joseph Newcomer provides comprehensive examination of disputed Killian memos in CBS report. A computer typesetting expert, he uses his knowledge to cast serious doubt on the authenticity of documents "60 Minutes" relied on in its story on President Bush's Air National Guard service.
Bloggers are just doing the journalism that journalists refuse to do.
-PJ
And this poltroon would love to build a barricade to keep them out that would make the Berlin Wall look like a picket fence.
Awesome post - thank you!
Reminiscent of the New York elitist Democrat who wondered how George Bush managed to win, since nobody she knew voted for him.
Diebold fixed the election. Duh.
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