A series of Tweets this morning from our friend Dave Slusher:
- All this talk about superdelegates is GOP spin to convince voters that the Democratic party is as autocratic and heavy handed as they are.
- If the mass media starts chattering on a topic and it is not verifiable, I assume it is a lie. "Long Dem primary hurts them." Uh huh. Liars.
- Mass media has the viewpoint of moneyed interests and reports thusly. In the blogosphere it is too hard to buy everyone's opinion.
- I mean "buy" as in pay for, not believe. In the interminable bloggers v. journalists fight, I'm leaning away from journalism ever more.
- When I interviewed people at Orycon, they made me get a press pass to do it. I fought because I really didn't want one.
- I didn't want to identify as press. I'd rather tell people I'm a piano player in a whorehouse so they don't lose as much respect for me.
- Individual journalists are on the side of the angels but they don't control the cameras and printing presses.
I don't want to talk about Dave's perceptions and opinions and their relative validity. I have no doubt that some of these thoughts resemble those of many, if not yet most, Americans. I'm not even going to defend the integrity of professional journalists -- I've seen or read about too many opaque decisions that "professionals" have staunchly refused to explain.
But from my standing as a pro-jo AND a blogger, I did want to make one observation of my own. I think New Media people, as a group, tend to be overly optimistic about the integrity and immunity-from-manipulation of whatever we consider to be "the blogosphere" (does the blogosphere include the Twitterstream? Or the Videoborg?) these days.
Print newspaper journalism is full of shibolleths and SOPs that make no sense to outsiders. Even many of us in the business don't remember where they came from. From my experience, many of the strange-looking contortions you see in the news media are the result of leftover institutional wisdom that developed in response to problems and manipulations that occurred long ago in a radically different mediascape.
Getting multiple sources? An attempt to prevent being gamed by someone with an agenda. Giving weight to official sources over non-institutional sources? An attempt to grant greater credence to sources that are supposedly accountable to the public, versus any old jackleg with a complaint who might want to game the system.
Want a lesson in journalistic caution? Read any professionally written story about a crime. Nobody "did" anything: It's all "in connection with," "police said," "alleged," "arrested on charges of," etc. Because you want to respect the tradition of innocent until proven guilty.
Seems pretty straightforward, until you get into situations like rape and various sex crimes that are considered to be so heinous that even being associated with such charges is a permanent stain on a person's reputation. And if you don't name a rape victim, when should you name a rape suspect? When he's arrested? When he's convicted? How do you repair his reputation if the charges are later dropped? And what if the rape occurred the victim's home? How much detail do you give about the location? Don't neighbors have a right to know about crime in their community? Doesn't the victim have the right to privacy? How much information can you give before you identify the victim? How much information can you withhold before you're misleading the public by giving the impression that crime is random and everywhere?
Think that's an abstract situation? Think again. Some years ago there was an outbreak of "home invasion" robberies in suburbia. Cops told reporters that they suspected most of the victims were low-level drug dealers or addicts who had run afoul of their higher-ups and suppliers (this later turned out to be true, arrests were made, and the "wave" of home invasions stopped). The catch? Police weren't charging the victims with a crime. Even if the victim had a long rap sheet, is it wrong to bring that up? Isn't that blaming the victim? Shouldn't the focus be on the crime and the criminal?
So the local news media simply avoided any explicit mention the likely context of these crimes, scrupulously writing around those issues with vague, rote phrases. And the result was that middle-aged and elderly women who read the paper daily and are fearful of crime to begin with generally concluded that home-invasion was a randomized, pervasive threat and that they were no longer safe in their own homes. Which, incidentally, probably sold more papers and influenced how the follow-up stories got displayed. And so on.
Political coverage? I used to describe what I did as a stylized dance in which the form was far more important than the substance. Not because I was trying to warp the process, but because I was trying to serve a public interest according to rules that had been passed down to me. "Right or wrong," we used to say, "it's got to be accurate." There's no room in that statement for deeper context, or even the awareness that YOU ARE THE GAME the players are trying to win.
I don't raise these questions to say that one approach to coverage is "right" and another is wrong. Rather, I want to illustrate a difference between Big Media and small media: Big media takes some of its responsibilities very seriously, though not always for altruistic reasons. Big media has (or had) deep pockets, and you write big checks when you invade a private citizen's privacy or libel someone. Convince one constituency that you're unfair and you'll lose their subscriptions.
Bloggers -- with no money on the table and relatively small individual readerships -- don't tend to worry about such things.
This Big Media system of journalistic credibility via gatekeeping, formalism, caution and hostility to introspection is in EPIC FAIL mode right now, as Dave's attitudes attest. The most significant cause, I think, was that as others learned the rules by which we played, everyone learned how to manipulate them. For reasons too numerous to outline here, we failed to respond in a coherent way. Our rules -- developed to PREVENT error and manipulation -- became a means to turn the news into a weapon.
So now here come the bloggers. Many have never given a thought to their process, but they trust their integrity because they think they know themselves. Or they think they're transparent enough that the process doesn't matter. Or, more likely, they still define their identity in relation to Big Media, rather than truly independent of it.
How would we blog if there was no Big Media? How would we define fairness? Integrity? If you were responsible for the coverage of campaigns, how would you account for the real-time balancing of competing interests? For the fact that you're often dealing with people who are highly paid for what they do BECAUSE THEY'RE SMARTER, BETTER AND LESS PRINCIPLED? That's a big lesson I had to learn as a reporter/editor, and I learned it the hard way.
I remember being quietly disappointed by the comments I heard from bloggers on the topic of gatekeeping at last year's ConvergeSouth conference. They weren't informed comments from people with whom I disagreed: They were ignorant comments from people who had never seriously considered the social and ethical conundrums that come with communicating in public. That so many of them seemed to feel superior to "the media" was just kinda ... pathetic (to clarify: Dave Slusher's Tweets inspired this post, but he isn't one of these thoughtless people. I know he's given a lot of thought to some of these issues).
Bloggers are already being co-opted by partisan forces, by companies, by the government, by marketers. Congratulations to us: We're significant enough to be manipulated. Our Golden Age of new-media innocence is rapidly coming to a close -- if it hasn't already ended.
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