Eat The Press: Blogging On A Sunday About Blogging And The Media
This Sunday’s post is all about blogging
- But first, Andrew Sullivan publishes a very un-presidential candidate quote from Bill Richardson on the subject of legalizing marijuana for medical purposes: “So what if it’s risky? It’s the right thing to do.” However, I do take issue with Sullivan’s comment about what a surprise it is to hear a Democrat say they wanted to do what’s right. I would change that comment to “When was the last time you heard a national candidate say that (and actually mean it)?” Clinton and Obama just had to “clarify” their statements on homosexuality because they seemed unable to come out and say what is right the first time, and McCain had to check his positions on contraception and AIDS before answering a simple question posed by a member of the press: “Do you support the distribution of tax-payer subsidized condoms in Africa to fight the spread of HIV?” Good grief–does it really have to be that hard? Sometimes we should all agree to do things just because they’re the right thing to do. Until we get to that point, we are going to suffer a lot more fools who tell us things like they can cut our taxes without impacting the economic security and future of this country, just as a for instance.
- The L.A. Times gives TPMmuckraker and Josh Marshall some of the respect they deserve for their muckraking efforts:
The world headquarters of TPM Media is pretty much like any small newsroom, anywhere, except for the shirts. And the dog. And the quiet. Most newsrooms are notably noisy places, full of shrill phones and quacking reporters. Here there is mainly quiet, except for the clacking keyboards.
It’s 20 or so blocks up town to the heart of the media establishment, the Midtown towers that house the big newspaper, magazine and book publishers. And yet it was here in a neighborhood of bodegas and floral wholesalers that, over the last two months, one of the biggest news stories in the country — the Bush administration’s firing of a group of U.S. attorneys — was pieced together by the reporters of the blog Talking Points Memo.
The bloggers used the usual tools of good journalists everywhere — determination, insight, ingenuity — plus a powerful new force that was not available to reporters until blogging came along: the ability to communicate almost instantaneously with readers via the Internet and to deputize those readers as editorial researchers, in effect multiplying the reporting power by an order of magnitude.
Read the entire article. TPM Media has been showing the mainstream media how crowdsourcing should be done for years.
- And speaking of crowdsourcing and citizen journalism in general, the esteemed NYU professor of journalism and general rabble rouser, Jay Rosen, announces that NewAssignment.net has opened Assignment Zero for business on his blog Press Think. Assignment Zero’s slogan is “Pro-Am Journalism Opens On The Web,” and it means exactly that. Anyone can sign up and work on a story by doing research, writing, editing, fact-checking, etc. Of course Assignment Zero has a blog too.
- I’ve been thinking about the continuing debate surrounding NSDP’s cancellation of the Fox News Democratic presidential debate and encountered a couple of great posts on the subject. First, from the LA Times’ Ronald Brownstein:
Fox cloaks itself in the mantle of objectivity with the nudge-nudge insistence that it—and it alone—provides “fair and balanced” coverage of the news. Then it advances its financial and ideological interests by promoting lurid accusations from conservatives against Democrats, accusations that are routinely debunked later by the mainstream media. Many Fox reporters are fair. But overall the network—through its language, its news decisions and its hosts—generally functions more like a cog in the Republican message machine than as a conventional news organization that attempts to abide, however imperfectly, by the traditional standards of (yes) fairness and balance.
Brownstein goes on to discuss how the debate on the debate might not only affect the 2008 presidential election, but affect how we think about news in this country. And while I don’t agree with how he envisions the Democrats using this new debate on political discourse to their advantage, its certainly something Fox News should think about. What I hope comes out of this debate is that the news media in general starts to understand that the citizenry of this country wants and deserves more respect from news organizations. Either stop calling yourself that, or get with the program. The news media should not be a tool for any political party, the news media is and always should be a tool of the citizenry for political and corporate oversight.
- Jay Rosen also delves into the conflict between conservatives and the news media on an excellent and well researched post called “Grave and Deteriorating for the Children of Agnew,” that puts the problem into historical context. His post is in part a response to a conservative warblogger who recently “lionized” Spiro Agnew. Yes, that’s what I wrote, Spiro Agnew.
Rosen likens the warbloggers to Enron employees in the know before the company’s demise. What do you do when you know its all falling to pieces? Deny, deny, deny, or at least pretend you don’t know what’s going on. The denial has gotten so bad Rosen notes, that Rich Lowry wrote the following as a sort of plea for reason in a December article in the National Review:
“The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit,” Lowry wrote. “It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives.”
Its “confounding” that the mainstream media might be right sometimes? I also think the mainstream media is often biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more faillible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit, but I certainly wouldn’t find it “confounding” that they ever get anything right. That’s an amazing statement–there is a whole group of people out there, some of them intelligent–who are so intent to “win” the debate, that evidence and reality don’t count. Ironically, as Rosen points out, Lowry was trying to convince warbloggers that their lack of self-reflection and investigation, and their inability to admit mistakes is now making things worse, not only for themselves, but all conservatives:
Lowry was saying this strategy had gone badly. “Realism is essential in any war,” he wrote, “and it is impossible without an ability to assimilate bad news, even bad news that comes from distasteful sources.” He should have gone further: If you really wanted Bush to succeed in Iraq, and you noticed that he could never be wrong or accept that bad news bearers could be right, this was a warning sign that the warbloggers themselves, as friends of the president’s project, should have taken the lead in discussing. Why didn’t they?
That’s the million dollar question isn’t it?Why didn’t they ever consider that they might be wrong when all evidence points in that direction? This is how ridiculous our political discourse has become–grown men and women denying what is right in front of their eyes because its much worse to be wrong and “lose” than it is to get things right. And in the end, isn’t that what Fox News is all about? Winning rather than losing? Shaping the news in their own image so that its viewers don’t have to second guess themselves? People like Jay Rosen will do what they can to keep the media on its toes, but its up to all of us to help them.
Similar Posts:
- Another Fox Debate Bites The Dust
- Crowdsourcing: Getting The Milk For Free
- 44% of Americans Online Read Political Blogs
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Yawn. Sigh. Crowdsourcing? Give me an f’in break on the WIRED magazine neologisms with a shelf life of less than a week. I’ve already got a bad case of “holocaust fatigue.” But I’m taking medicine for that. Crowdsourcing is flashmobbing for the employed. Sometimes I think this damn Internet is completely worthless. Sometimes a republic is better than a democracy.
Not in this case surely. Douche (in the Gawker-French sense–accent missing)!
While I enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan, you make a good point about his remarks on Bill Richardson. That’s a risky thing for any politician to say, regardless of party. But it shows that the D’s are getting some swagger back.