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January 4, 2006
Reports and Editors
Glenn Reynolds points out some of the distressingly wrong news stories from the past few months, and notes: "If bloggers had made these kinds of mistakes, Big-Media folks would be pointing them out as evidence that the blogosphere can't be trusted. But where were all those editors, filters, and fact-checkers?" It's actually worse than Glenn notes here, because these are places where the media got things wrong because they were sensational (Katrina), lazy (wolves) or fast and emotional (the miners). Glenn doesn't note here the other news failures, the ones where the reporters were being partisan attack dogs (forged memos), treasonous bastards (the reporting of how the CIA moves captured enemy around, or of where they are held, or of how we monitor enemy communications), deliberate liars (Jayson Blair comes to mind) or simply tools for tyrants (Eason Jordan to Saddam, the AP to the Palestinian terrorists and the Iraqi terrorists, etc). In other words, Glenn's current post only notes the understandable accidents, not the deliberate abuse of their power to control the flow of information.
And it is those deliberate failures, far more than the understandable mistakes, that condemn how the mainstream media works. And frankly, I think that the media gets it half right when they criticize bloggers. The media criticism of bloggers is on two lines: bloggers don't have the resources to uncover facts, but depend on the mainstream media for that; and bloggers don't have the "layers of editing staff, fact-checkers, lawyers, an editor-in-chief, and a publisher". The former is correct, and the latter is bogus.
It is clear that bloggers don't have the resources to have reporters (or stringers) covering all kinds of local events, never mind national and international events. It simply takes a large base of resources to put reporters around the world and have them cover everything of interest. So large, in fact, that only a few organizations even try: even the NY Times or CNN rely on local reporters, foreign stringers, wire services and press releases for their information. Still, combining those sources with the ability to direct a large reportorial staff to cover specific events, or to dig up more information on a story, is critical, and beyond the abilities of bloggers as a corporate entity, notwithstanding the efforts of Pajamas Media. Even the ability to get interviews with senior administration officials or Congressmen, or to embed with the military (Bill Roggio had to be sponsored by AEI, I believe), is difficult for bloggers, but simple for reporters from virtually any news outlet.
But news organizations have been having serious problems. Not only is their readership and viewership generally declining, and with it soon their advertising revenues (apparently subscription revenues have already fallen dramatically), but their credibility is going down the tubes as well. (Which follows the other, or whether they are coincident, it is not my purpose to explore here.) This is, ironically, largely a failure not of the reporters, but of the very things the media companies claim make them the gold standard: the editors and fact checkers. In actual fact, the editors more often insert opinion than excise it, and the fact checkers generally don't check. This combination leads to a downwards spiral in reliability, because no well-gathered and contextualized fact outweighs the failure of the organization's quality control, and one inserted (by the editor, or despite the editor) adjective, like describing a wholly legal and normal activity as "technically legal", can destroy the reliability of a report otherwise laden with useful information.
As far as I, and apparently many others, am concerned, punditry on television or in the newspapers no longer interests me. I can find in blogs a more articulate, more subject-aware and more eloquent set of commentators on all sides of any issue than the media can produce: they have to recycle the same set of pundits for every issue. I would, for example, rather listen to Phil Carter or Austin Bay on Iraq than, say, Daniel Schorr, who is paid to have opinions on any issue that comes to hand and apparently knows very little about history, foreign policy, the military or political theory (as opposed to insider political events). But the media is still essential because, despite these flaws and shortcomings, it is only the media organizations that have the resources to gather the raw data in bulk and to filter it together into a single source.
The moment that the blogs develop this ability, or that some media organization decides to publish raw facts and reports, well indexed and permanently maintained, rather than polished stories, the utility of the established media will rapidly drop away.
And it is that realization, even if unconscious, that makes reporters so afraid of bloggers.
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