Bridging The Gap (or Widening It?)
For the last few weeks, I've quietly been meeting with and emailing a number of alt-media and MSM types, and discussing blogs and blogging and the MSM and the newspaper of the future and all sorts of good stuff.
Part of the effort has been motivated by the notion that "Blogs v. MSM" is tired, and it's time for both blogs (and MSM) to start thinking about what they have in common, and how they can complement each other. Part of the effort has been truly living by the blogger creed and suggesting to MSM types who read us -- hey, we dish out the criticism, but we can also take it. Why not engage us when you think WE get something wrong?
But there are major gaps in understanding still, and I don't know that they can be bridged (or should be).
That's become apparent in some recent email exchanges with one MSM type. They've been friendly email exchanges of value, and I don't want anyone to read anything that follows otherwise. Still, I was a little surprised when my correspondent emailed to suggest that my blogHOUSTON criticism of a newspaper editorial for being inaccurate wasn't fair, because I hadn't contacted the editorial writers and therefore didn't necessarily understand the production process for editorials at a major newspaper. Apparently, editorials that appear on Mondays are often written as far back as the previous Friday. The point of my correspondent was that it was quite likely the editorial was written with the best knowledge at the time, and that if I wanted to engage in "serious media criticism" I really needed to be aware of that process, and the only way to be aware of such mitigating factors is always to contact the journalist.
Can you see the distinction right there between the way bloggers think about what they do, and how MSM journalists think of "serious media criticism?"
Bloggers tend to be much more concerned with textual and factual analysis than process (although the first two can drive us to investigate process). In my case, when I read a print publication, I'm much more concerned with what the TEXT says. Is this accurate? Sensible? Silly? Consistent with what appears to be an agenda (the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy for example)? Etc. At bH, the questions we are trying to answer are mostly about the TEXT.
So, one of many problems I had with that Chron editorial was that it made a claim about James Gannon and "Web Sites" that was inaccurate at the time the editorial was printed. We know it was inaccurate at the time because that same day, the Chron ran a Howard Kurtz column that had appeared in the WaPo the day before, with information that contradicted the editorial. Further, Kurtz had reported that same information on Thursday, as had CNN. That part was a no-brainer. It didn't even cross my mind to email anybody at the Chron to ask why they posted an editorial with information that contradicted information in the Kurtz column they posted the same day. In effect, my blog post was that question!
For my correspondent, "serious media criticism" required that I email those journalists to find out why this transpired. For my correspondent, the PROCESS seemed as important as the text. My correspondent's suggestion that the editorial might well have been written on Friday for Monday publication, and that I should have found this out was illustration of a concern with process that I found very odd. But even so, the fact that contradictory information ran at the same time in the newspaper only suggested to me a potential problem with the editorial staff's procedures -- not that my criticism was off base, unfair, or unserious.
There's definitely a gap there conceptually in how bloggers and MSM might approach this. But I'm not willing to concede that my focus on text and facts at the expense of a concern over process is less than serious.
Now, we did find out later that Gannon apparently DID have one website hosted, and we posted that update as soon as we found out about it. Contrast that with the fact that the Chronicle has still not admitted its editorial was inaccurate at the time it ran (and a recent correction on another matter that wasn't exactly forthcoming) and I think you see another example in the gap between the way bloggers and MSM think.
This isn't the first time I've been utterly puzzled by something like this, and my friend Laurence Simon frequently reminds me that part of what is going on is that MSM isn't adjusting very well to the breaking down of the old "rules" and the idea that they don't fully control the agenda or the terms of the game any more. Trying to impose the old "rules" of "serious media criticism" on the new media of weblogs may just be a manifestation of a maladjusted MSM. That's not to say we can't take some of those rules or that we shouldn't try to be reasonable and accurate and fair -- but it is to say that the blogosphere shouldn't necessarily adopt those methods just because MSM says so.
Conveniently (for me), Peggy Noonan wrote about the power of the blogosphere earlier today, and it seems appropriate to bring in some of her seven points:
The blogosphere isn't some mindless eruption of wild opinion. That isn't their power. This is their power:
1. They use the tools of journalists (computer, keyboard, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to ask the question) and of the Internet (Google, LexisNexis) to look for and find facts that have been overlooked, ignored or hidden. They look for the telling quote, the ignored statistic, the data that have been submerged. What they are looking for is information that is true. When they get it they post it and include it in the debate. This is a public service.
I wrote that we're focused on the TEXT and facts at bH, but ultimately the goal is getting to the truth -- which is why I bolded it above.
2. Bloggers, unlike reporters at elite newspapers and magazines, are independent operators. They are not, and do not have to be, governed by mainstream thinking. Nor do they have to accept the directives of an editor pushing an ideology or a publisher protecting his friends. Bloggers have the freedom to decide on their own when a story stops being a story. They get to decide when the search for facts is over. They also decide on their own when the search for facts begins.
I think Noonan is telling us it's okay not to adopt the methods of "serious media criticism." I think she's also telling us we can keep doing the Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy. Goodie!
3. Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: "Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report." In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that's new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That's not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn't carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago. In the old days a lot of interesting information fell off the editing desk in this way. Now it doesn't. This is a public service.
In other words, blog posts are not written on Friday to post on Monday, with the hopes they'll still be accurate! I take for granted the institutional advantage Noonan speaks of, which probably explains why I have trouble understanding why anyone would write an editorial on Friday to post on a Monday and hope for the best.
6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web.
Much of what Noonan says is true of both blogs and MSM, and that last bolded portion is succinct and accurate! Because we're timely, we may not always utilize the MSM tools of "serious media criticism," but we're engaging the conversation and moving it along while the editorials are sitting on a network hard drive somewhere, waiting to be published. Instead of telling us how to be MORE like THEM, I would suggest to MSM that maybe they should give some thought to this advice from Glenn Reynolds:
Well, everybody does screw up, and there's nothing unforgivable about screwing up. What's unforgivable is either deliberately misleading, as with the Rather bogus-document story, or following a screwup with denials and stonewalls as with Rather or Jordan. The defensiveness with which a lot of Big Media folks are responding to this topic suggest to me that either they're unable to imagine a swift and open correction, or that their work is even worse than we think . . . . At any rate, as I said on Charlie Rose, they could easily incorporate bloggers as unpaid fact-checkers and assistant editors, improving their product and making friends. All they need to do is get off those high horses for a while.
Bloggers and MSM can learn from each other, but I would suggest that MSM has to be willing to learn as well as to lecture. I'm not convinced we've reached that point just yet.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 02/18/05 00:51 | Media Matters | Technorati
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Comments
Kevin, great case study regarding the gap between the MSM and blogs. Your point about the process vs. the product is well-taken; I hadn't really considered it in those terms.
Posted by Eric @ 13:06 on 02/18/05
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