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January 22, 2005
THE ROLE OF BLOGS
I suppose it was inevitable... a backlash against blogs. Fresh off an election season in which bloggers and their influence were almost as big a story as the campaign, the regular media feels threatened -- and they've begun fighting back.
The Wall Street Journal is leading the charge, raising the question of ethics in blogging... but they're not alone. The traditional media's been full of stories in the last few weeks about bloggers who failed to disclose that they either worked for or had once worked for some of the people they'd been blogging about. In fact, as the Journal reports,
At Harvard University this weekend, a small group of journalists, bloggers and media thinkers are gathering in a conference, "Blogging, Journalism & Credibility" to hash out some of these issues, and kick around the idea of a blogging code of ethics. Should bloggers disclose their sources of income? Do journalists who also blog face conflicting standards? Wow... we've got Harvard paying attention now? Bloggers must be important, huh?
The hype about bloggers making the media increasingly irrelevant is made more credible by what the tradtional news media has become -- lapdogs to the conservative viewpoint who pepper their skewed "reporting" with stories about celebrity divorces and other blatant paeans to ratings. If the news media would do its job and stop rolling over for conservatives and playing dumb and pandering to the public's attention span, it would be much easier for people to take them seriously.
The current blog-ethics hysteria in the media turns the spotlight on others rather than look inward at the true reasons for its declining relevance. For example, the incident everyone seems to be citing as the moment when blogs became Blogs is when the blogosphere was first to the story of the CBS National Guard documents being forged. The problem wasn't that bloggers became reporters and chased a story; the problem was that CBS screwed up in the first place. Bloggers didn't "bring down Rather;" CBS News' shoddy research and bad journalism brought down Rather. But the current hysteria ignores that point.
To focus the spotlight on bloggers is to miss the point -- namely, that the reason people are increasingly turning to blogs is that the traditional media has lost credbility... and that blogging is simply an extension of what has passed for journalism for the last fifteen years at least; i.e., the presentation of opinion as fact.
As for blogging ethics, I find the argument about spin replacing news to be foolish and somewhat disingenuous. Fox "News" has been pulling that stunt for a decade. They're the pioneers of spin as news. But as Skippy the Bush Kangaroo eloquently points out,
bloggers aren't reporters. they are repeaters. they are simply folks sitting around a living room talking to each other about the world. only the living room in this case is the internet...
Holding bloggers to journalistic standards of ethics would be like holding a group engaging in a discussion in a barroom to those standards. Blogging is, almost by definition, the expression of opinions about the goings-on of the world. If bloggers happen to break a story (ie, the CBS Bush documents), that doesn't change the basic realities of blogging. We're not reporters. Most of us don't pretend to be.
You as a blog reader have the right (and a responsibility) to, again borrowing from Skippy, consider the source. Anyone who's read even one of my political posts knows which side of the fence I'm on. Even by the stuff I choose to write about, all but the most unobservant reader can intuit that I'm a lefty. Excepting the occasional off-the-deep-end vent, I write what I do in hopes of being persuasive -- I hope people who read what I wrote will agree with me. But I don't pretend to be reporting. And the very fact that opinion appears in these posts makes very clear that I'm not engaged in journalism -- the Fox "News" precedent aside. Best of all, if you as a reader don't agree with me, a key part of the blogging relationship is that you can leave comments telling me what a jerk I am or how foolish my position is -- thus adding not only to the public debate but to the record of the discussion.
Not that I'm suggesting bloggers should be held to no more stringent journalistic guidelines than Fox. There are basics we should hold to -- for one, we should tell readers up front where we're coming from. And readers have the right to know that our opinions aren't paid for -- or know who's paying us if that's the case. (None of us should be doing an Armstrong Williams impression.) If we don't set that precedent, we run the risk of blogs getting co-opted by corporate marketing departments and becoming parody. To remain in their purest form, blogs by definition should be unsponsored opinion -- or to have that sponsorship revealed.
But I draw the line at revealing "former connections;" i.e., a blogger used to work for a specific candidate or cause, so those connections should be revealed. Someone who once worked for Bush or for Kerry or Dean or the Sierra Club likely did so because they already had opinions and beliefs that led them to feel an affinity for the cause they worked for. The fact that they once were in a position to act on those beliefs and get paid for it doesn't make their opinions less (or more) valid.
In most cases, bloggers are simply observers of the events of the world around them. We don't cause news; we don't report news; we just give our opinions about news. And what I still come back to is that even the idea is wrong that the expression of opinion should be constrained within some ethical system. Since when is having an opinion subject to standards? The difference between blogs and water coolers or the corner bar isn't much more than the number of people who have access to the conversation.
The hand-wringing is a good show, but those who read blogs know what they're getting when they log on. When someone wants news, they'll go to the traditional media outlet of their choice. When someone wants rhetorical ammunition for their arguments about the news, or wants to commune with others who share their outlook, they go to blogs.
Where's the problem in that?
