From
Swords Crossed:
Howard Kurtz points to this unintentionally hilarious Philly Inquirer piece by Jonathan Last, the Online Editor of the Weekly Standard on blogging. This part struck me as hilarious coming from him:
But the biggest evil of blogs is that first flaw, blogging's original sin: the discounting of news-gathering in favor of news analysis. Bloggers are forever telling us how easy journalism is, yet very few of them have ever really practiced it. Sure, they may have written opinion pieces that compare favorably to the work of Molly Ivins or Ann Coulter, but opinion writing is a tiny - and let's be honest, inconsequential - corner of the journalism world. Real journalism - the practice of adding to the store of public knowledge by reporting news - is a difficult, thankless, and often unpleasant task. Bloggers want no part of it. Everyone wants E.J. Dionne's job; no one wants to be Michael Dobbs.
And what is the Weekly Standard, both on and offline, doing in terms of journalism? Why nothing of course. It is Rupert Murdoch's subsidized bloviating from the Right. Which is fine by me. But please, to come and preach about how BLOGS are leading to disdain for journalism when you are the Online Editor of the Weekly Standard? Come on. Here's a sample of the fine journalism offered by the Weekly Standard this week:
John Podhoretz reviews Flight 93. Ari Richter argues for McCain as SecDef. Lee Smith theorizes on terrorism in Egypt. Wesley Smith labels assisted suicide groups as evil. Fred Barnes does whatever the hell Fred Barnes does. Thomas Jocelyn attacks the NYTimes. And so on.
Um, Mr. Last, I don't think much shoe leather was worn or phone bills run up for those stories. You work at a house of glass.
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Newsgathering HAS been devalued - by you and yours Mr. Last. It's the Standard, and TNR, and Crossfire, and Fox and CNN and the like that devalued
quality newsgathering.
The blogs, by taking newsgathering seriously, and reviewing it seriously, have reemphasized the importance of newsgathering, not diminished it. What blogs have done is treated bloviators, like the ones at the Standard, as the average unremarkable stuff it largely is. Bloviating has been democratized. And rightly so. The usual suspects really are, by and large, predictable, lazy and bereft of insight. So are most bloggers. That's the human condition. But the best bloggers, like the best pundits, add to the conversation. Who are the best? Ask a hundred people and you'll get a hundred opinions. And that's how it should be.
But Jonathan Last's Inquirer piece is an example of BAD bloviating in my view. Consider this:
Take out these two essentials - news-gathering and prose style - and what are you left with? A medium that values speed, volume, and vehemence. While none of these traits is antithetical to good journalism, none of them is particularly conducive to it, either.As a long-term proposition, I don't buy the superiority of blogs and the New Media any more than I bought the notion that America Online was more valuable than Time Warner. The Old Media - the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Atlantic Monthly - add to the store of public information in ways which seem irreplaceable. Do they have problems? Sure. Are some journalists bad at their jobs? Absolutely. But taken as a whole, the Old Media performs an enormous and valuable function that the New Media is neither able, nor inclined, to emulate.
And the marketplace is slowly coming to understand that.
You mean the marketplace didn't understand that before? I am pretty sure it did. I think maybe Last didn't understand that. I also understand that, except for speed and volume, the Weekly Standard offers the same as many blogs. No newsgathering and bad prose. Only vehemence.
The truth is blogs depend on newsgathering and journalism. Just like pundits. Blogs are not going to replace real journalism. They will compete with the bloviators, like Jonathan Last. There is nothing special about them or him. The democratization of bloviating is one of the features of blogs. And a good one.
But blogs also perform a function that the bloviators have not - REAL vetting of our newsgatherers. For example, last week I wrote about some shoddy work by the New York Times. My work led to a correction:
Remember this?
The New York Times changed the earlier accurate version of a story on testimony on secret CIA prisons in Europe (a story first reported in depth by Dana Priest and for which she won the Pulitzer Prize) by the EU counterterrorism chief Gijs DeVries, to an inaccurate version that favored the Bush Administration.
. . . someone in the Times did not like [the original] accurate reporting, and instead rewrote the story, to make it both inaccurate and more favorable to the Bush Administration. The later edited version of the story stated that:
Mr. de Vries said the European Parliament investigation had not uncovered rights abuses despite more than 50 hours of testimony by rights advocates and people who say they were abducted by C.I.A. agents. A similar investigation by the Council of Europe, the European human rights agency, came to the same conclusion in January -- though the leader of that inquiry, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, said then that there were enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation.
Emphasis suppied.) Notice the two changes to inaccuracies favorable to the Bush Adminsitration: (1) The statement about the January Council of Europe report is no longer attributed to DeVries; (2)the statement is treated as FACT, when the earlier story plainly marked it as INACCURATE.
But, lo and behold, a correction:
Correction: April 26, 2006
An article on Friday about the failure of European Union investigators to confirm the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons in Europe misstated the interim findings of a separate inquiry conducted by the Council of Europe, a human-rights monitoring organization. Those findings, reported in January, said that the council had not uncovered evidence that such centers had ever existed, but that there were enough indications to justify continuing the inquiry. The findings did not assert that no rights abuses had been uncovered.
Does it matter? A little bit it does. Because the folks who made the mistake will try hard not to do it again. And that matters. Because newgathering matters a whole hell of a lot more than what Jonathan Last thinks or what I think.