It's always amusing watching the MSM look down on the blogosphere.
Let's be honest. Traditional journalists hate the blogosphere. Why? Because bloggers aren't held to the "same standard" as newspaper journalists. Anyone can blog, they say. Not everyone can be a reporter!
Well, I hate to bust that MSM bubble, but just about anybody blogging could be a reporter, because being able to write in an engaging style is a large part of being a reporter. Yes, it's important to get all the facts right and the quotes correctly. But if you can't write in a way that captivates an audience, it doesn't really matter whether you are covering a school board meeting or a national political convention.
What brought this to mind was reading yet another self-serving piece by a MSM-type about the importance of the "real" press versus the blogosphere.
Sometimes argument -- a word that elevates blogosphere comment to a level it seldom attains on its own -- gains from old-fashioned gumshoe reporting. Compelling examples abound. On the same day I read of the Daily Kos convention in Chicago, I finished "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation," winner this year of the Pulitzer Prize for history. No one looms larger in the book by Gene Roberts Jr. and Hank Klibanoff than Claude Sitton, whose reporting in the New York Times in the 1960s would become legendary.
Mainstream journalism has had some incredible moments when it covered very important events. They covered World War II and actually supported the U.S. (something one doesn't see anymore). They wrote about and supported the Civil Rights Movement. But, unfortunately, their shameless sanctimony against Ronald Reagan (the "amiable dunce"), the constant drumbeat against conservatives, the mischaracterization of Southerners as racists and ignoramuses, the grossly inaccurate depictions of Christians as hypocrites and pro-lifers as misogynists all work against the supposedly wonderful work of the past.
Now, the MSM is most threatened by the blogosphere because bloggers are doing many of the functions newspapers and television have performed for decades. More refreshingly, bloggers do not feel the necessity to slip on the facade of objectivity and pretend they have no opinion. While the MSM will pretend it is neutral in the argument over abortion--even as they insult pro-lifers by constantly referring to them as "anti-abortion" and using the worst quotes available--bloggers feel no compulsion to pretend. If you go to a stick a fork in the baby's head until birth site, you are going to get discussions and argumentations that mirror that opinion. And, conversely, if you go to a pro-life site, you are going to get pro-life news.
Much as I disagree with moonbats on most things, I will admit to agreeing with Jill of Feministe when she says bloggers don't want to take journalists' jobs. They want journalists to do their jobs. I feel that way completely, although I'm sure it's about different issues.
I'd like, for instance, for journalists to keep their opinions to themselves and not voice them in their news stories. I'd like reporters to report facts, not their colorized versions of facts. I'd like reporters to question Democrats as ruthlessly as they do Republicans.
Mostly, I'd like reporters to do their jobs. You know, the one they supposedly spent all that time in j-school to do. Not the stylized job they may want.
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