I have been blogging for nearly a year. So I thought I’d opine a bit on the subject. First, something general:
Relations between blogs and the MSM remain tense, as these links from Glenn Reynolds and Roger Simon clearly indicate. I have myself heard in the newsroom comments about blogs that actually did sound, in Michelle Malkin’s phrase, “thoroughly unhinged.”
But it really isn’t blogging in general that bothers the MSM. It’s only the political blogs. The MSM doesn’t care about lit blogs or cooking blogs or knitting blogs — or even tech blogs or science blogs (except to the extent they might be useful in advancing some editorial viewpoint).
Blogs have challenged the MSM’s self-designated right to shape political debate by choosing what to cover and how to cover it. The MSM claims it has resources not available to bloggers — and it does. So how explain the disparity between what was reported in the papers and on TV during Hurricane Katrina and what we have since determined was actually the case? This was, after all, the demonstration case for the superiority of the MSM.
Amanda Bennett, editor of The Inquirer, wrote a column that ran on Christmas about surveys of our readers’ likes and dislikes. The finding I thought most interesting was this: “More than half our readers weren't even aware that we had endorsed a presidential candidate!” This really seems remarkable, considering that we had gone to the trouble of endorsing John Kerry for 21 straight days.
But maybe not. Lots of people may go into journalism because they’re interested in politics, but it doesn’t follow from that the people who read newspapers share that interest. A good many do, of course — and they are precisely the ones likely to read blogs as well and to blog themselves.
I suspect that the MSM’s role in shaping political debate is going to steadily decline. There will be plenty for it to cover. But from now on the agenda, increasingly, is going to be set by others. The blogs are here to stay. Political debate now takes place in an electronic agora. Get used to it.
But it’s the rest of the readers that interest me, the people who didn’t even know we had endorsed a candidate for president. Now if you think the be-all and end-all of existence is politics, then you will probably dismiss such people as boobs. I suspect they’re people who have better things to do than be preoccupied day in and day out by matters over which the only control they have involves entering a booth and casting a vote every now and again.
Reporters and editors ought to start visiting the rest of the blogosphere. It might give them some idea of what that large chunk of readers uninterested in the editorial board’s orotund pronouncements really is interested in. Plenty of potential stories there. Plenty of potential readers, too.
The no. 1 disadvantage of the MSM is its increasing datedness. Almost the entire paper is known to me even before it's out of the printing press. That is going to prove its nemesis.
ReplyDeletep.s. Thanks for referring to me, Frank.
I think the problem is that so many journalists have always seen their personal income as coming in two components: salary plus political influence.
ReplyDeleteThe second part is draining away and there is nothing they can do about it, so they are both downwardly mobile and terminally pissed off about it.
I think many people ignore the editorial side of their paper and read it for arts, sports, business, etc. I told a friend of mine I canceled the LA Times because I couldn't stand the editorial slant any more, and she said "oh, I never read those anyway."
ReplyDeleteIt is not just the political blogs.
ReplyDeleteDear Frank:
ReplyDeleteExcellent post, and I am in agreement. My thought in this post were quite similar to yours. Lucianne made my post one her "Must Reads" yesterday.
Melville,
ReplyDeleteTaking your third point first because it is most important:
After all, unlike a lot of bloggers (as far as I can tell), commentators in the MSM commonly have come by their expertise through years of working in their field. You may call them communist or reactionary -- take your pick -- put you can't say their opinions are not based on solid knowledge.
I think it's highly unlikely that you have ever been quoted by the media in regard to a field that you know something about. What is truly astonishing to most of us who deal with the media is how unbelievably ignorant they are and how unbelievably bad at listening. I have gotten both press and TV coverage on several occasions for humanitarian work with Kazakh orphans -- press coverage that was entirely favorable and intended to serve as advocacy -- and in every case the reporter has completely butchered the facts. They simply don't know anything about adoption, and so they don't know what's important, and they cut the wrong parts out of the partial quotes...it's unbelievable. By the same token, if you read lots of military blogs, it takes about twenty minutes to realize that the news media (full of people who never served in the military and who don't even know many people who have) have no real idea what the words they're using mean.
What journalists know is journalism. What they don't know is everything else, which is to say, all the subjects that they pretend to cover, and all the subjects that are of any interest to anybody other than other journalists.
Now, #1: that on-the-ground coverage from Hurricane Katrina, with those 10,000 dead and the babies getting raped -- man, that was accurate stuff, wasn't it? Those people had the Real Scoop. After all, they were On The Ground.
What reporters can do is provide raw facts that are part of a picture. What they are pitifully bad at -- and what the blogosphere is exceptionally good at -- is collating and analyzing the facts. You are severely underestimating the tremendous revolution posed by a simple hyperlink and a few good search engines, which together give the entire world access to primary documents at the speed of a good internet connection. If there are twenty experts in the country capable of spotting a flaw in a news story (like the Rathergate memos), the chances that your typical ignorant reporter will know their names and bother to talk to them before he runs his story, are extremely small. But the odds are quite good that at least one of those experts will see the story and be moved to comment on his blog, "This is bullshit because of X, Y, and Z." Then anybody interested in the subject will promptly start hitting him by Google, and the blogosphere will start linking, and the next thing you know Dan Rather is out of a job. 'Cause it's a helluva lot harder to slide by with sloppy stuff than it used to be; the blogosphere brings subject-matter expertise that can't be matched by J-school graduates and combines it with genuine, implacably relentless diversity of opinions and agenda.
On your point #2: sure, that's what some people do. That's also the only reason that 90% of the NY Times's remaining subscribers have for continuing to read the Grey Lady's opinion pages. If your skepticism proves anything (highly doubtful), it proves only that you personally would not value a diversity of opinion enough to challenge yourself regularly with competing viewpoints (since if you were willing to do it you would know that there are people willing to do so). It doesn't follow that the rest of us are of equal intellectual indolence.
On #4, the media in question is lazy, dishonest, unprofessional, and pathologically homogenous, and usefully spoken of collectively. But to refer to them collectively you need some conventional term; and Main Stream Media has the advantage of being deeply satirical. The point, you see, is precisely that the Main Stream Media abandoned the mainstream long ago. The term is used for the same rhetorical effect that one might use in referring constantly to "the Becomingly Humble Mr. Kissinger."
On point #5: the term usually refers to the self-indulgently liberal wing of the media industry, and more generally to the sloppy, lazy, non-fact-checking print and television media whose culture originated in the pre-internet era and has not yet adjusted to the information revolution. It is the culture that thinks that people will be impressed and think your coverage must be accurate if you fly your blow-dried talking head (whether is name is Anderson or Shepard) down to read consistently inaccurate information from his teleprompter from a New Orleans street instead of from a boring old studio. Since it is meant to refer to a fuzzy-bordered subculture, you can't expect lots of precision in the definition, and therefore you are correct to identify the ease with which it can become a straw bogeyman. Ease is not, however, inevitability, and there do exist bloggers who use the term more or less rigorously.
As for point #6: try The Sheila Variations, starting with "Waiting in Line."
Melville,
ReplyDeleteOne other thing -- I do realize that you are trying to compare the people the media trot out as "experts" to bloggers. But the "experts" are selected and given air time by journalism majors who don't really know how to tell real experts from fake; they are cross-examined (to use the term at its loosest) by anchorpersons who don't know what are the important questions; and the cross-examination usually takes five minutes at most. The level of analysis and hostile fact-checking and criticism that goes on in the blogosphere is vastly more demanding. Shoddy commentary can survive much longer on CNN or Fox than it can in the blogosphere, simply because if the comments crowd successfully nails your butt more than a few times, the blog readership goes someplace else (other than people with whom you are cooperating in forming a hermetically sealed echo chamber).
Damn, Ken Pierce, that comment was simply fantastic. Thank you, thank you very much. I'm definitely going to use that.
ReplyDeleteAnd Frank, thank you. I'm going to have to read your blog more often.