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July 21, 2005
Flooding the Area
Wizbang points to something interesting, in relation to today's attacks in London: the BBC reporters' notes are available online. This brings up two very interesting points, in fact.
The first is that I wish reporters would always do this, would always show the raw material. These are the reports, as opposed to the stories. The stories - in the newspaper, on the radio or on TV - are built from these reports; they are a synthesis. But in with synthesizing the points into a coherent narrative, a point of view is also inserted, and it is from that that most media bias arises. In fact, it is possible to draw multiple narratives from most large sets of reports about related incidents, and by making the raw reports available, a person can read the reports and synthesize their own narrative understanding. This is a good thing.
The second point is that this is what the blogs cannot yet do: flood an area or a sector with reporters and gather information. Blogs are more like the editors who put together a story: they gather information from a variety of places, then inject their own viewpoint and form a narrative structure around the component reports. But there is no coordinating structure to gather the information in the first place, which puts bloggers at the mercy, largely, of the traditional news media for gathering information. But when only the parsed stories are available, not the raw reports, the information gathered can be partial and presented in a biased way. Developing such a capability is far more important to the ability of blogs to bypass the mainstream media than anything else blogs could do. Particularly because, since people with access to computers are just about everywhere, bloggers could potentially develop a news source much more vast than any conventional news organization. But again, this requires a system to coordinate the gathering and dissemination of information, and we don't have that yet.
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