The Indefatigable Defatigability Of...Dammit!

That's what you get when you try to be clever and your body can't decide if it's lunchtime or breakfastime.

Adam Cohen writes a piece on bloggers' ethics today, and I'm a bit torn about it. It's a lot hard to differentiate blog-to-blog than it is "regular" media source to "regular" media source. Take, for instance, the Dayton Daily News versus the L.A. Times. The L.A. Times is a quasi-national newspaper; not truly national, but with influence outsize to its distribution. The DDN is a local newspaper that reaches into a geographical area dominated by small suburbs and rural communities, surrounded by newspapers with larger distribution areas (Cincinnati and Columbus). No matter how good the paper is, its best work will simply be picked up and spread around the chain - but the DDN will not become a national paper.

Blogs, on the other hand, are accessible universally to anyone with the technology. Boobahmafoo Blog can be gotten to with only the additional effort of typing in the extra letters just as well as Atrios or Daily Kos can. Cohen starts out with limiting his suggestions for blogger ethics to large-circulation folks, although large-circulation is a nebulous idea in and of itself - if I manage to say the right thing in a post, my site jumps to "large circulation" in mere hours, then right back down to "middling circulation" as soon as the buzz wears off.

Roger Ailes finds many a fault with Cohen (although I'm surprised he missed Cohen's use of Lame Stream Media, a nickname so cutting edge that virtually nobody's using it yet), but as I read and chuckled at Ailes' post, it started reminding me of the strange dynamic that renders blogs so uselessly confused in a larger discussion on their purpose.

Anyone remember when the right blogosphere decided, virtually en masse, to make the entire discussion of American politics about quantifying the degree to which the New York Times (or, as Web loggers, also known as "bloggers", call it, the New York CRIMES) hated America? Then came Rathergate, its scrawny cousin Easongate, and various stories asking if blogging (i.e., conservative blogging) would replace media. That's when the weird doubletalk began, when people who called themselves the vanguards of a new wave of citizen journalists demurely began saying that they didn't want to replace the media, they just wanted to make it better. (And even if they didn't say it in the affirmative, anyone in the traditional media who asserted the opposite got predictably beaten down by the Not The Media Yet brigade.)

Bloggers cannot and will not replace the media. Craig's List is trying a weird variation on the idea, as they've created a great model for newspaper classifieds and are attempting to become some sort of nationwide local newspaper. (Pajama Media is another version of this, but differentiated by the critical distinction that it is absolutely destined for failure, whereas the CL idea is only very, very likely destined for failure.) The first issue is that bloggers aren't journalists - even looking at the "stories" that bloggers have actually broken, they're all dependent on other news coverage or on the existence of a media itself. Trent Lott? Without C-SPAN, he's still Majority Leader. Rathergate? Uh, worked for CBS, aired on CBS. Jeff Gannon? Reporter who managed to ask stupid things during a recorded press gaggle. What we are is investigative Googlers (credit to Ezra for the idea of "investigative Googlism"). We find out stuff about existing stories, cobble together news reports, or just get enraged by something a reporter/commentator has done. But we are no more journalists than car mechanics are car designers, than a projectionist is a director.

We could be held to the same standards that newspapers are, although there is no guild, no school of blogging, no way to train anyone to do it. There's also the fact that blogs are blogs precisely because they are a sort of unilateral fount of aggression - you find someone with a voice, a topic, and something to say that either pleases you or pisses you off, and you read them. This part, for instance, makes no sense:

Many bloggers make little effort to check their information, and think nothing of posting a personal attack without calling the target first - or calling the target at all.

So, if I called up David Brooks and asked him if I could call him a buffoon, I'm sure the New York Times would let me right through. We're little guys. They're big guys. It's what makes it so entertaining, people who are not in that sphere engaging the ideas of those in it - speaking truth to power and whatnot. In all honesty, could you imagine three hundred bloggers calling up a given editorialist or reporter to let them know that they're talking about them? And yes, many bloggers make little effort to fact check their information, even fewer correct the mistakes they make. That's because they aren't professionals, they aren't journalists, they aren't Walter Cronkite - they're amateur pundits, taking a cue from the current practice of public punditry. I don't know that much about anything, but I'm willing to just enough research to allow me to talk about it on end.

And if you need any more evidence about how sordidly stupid this entire search for bloggers' responsibilities is, look at who gets interviewed for the piece:

Ana Marie Cox, who edits Wonkette, notes that blogs are still "a very young medium," and that "things have yet to be worked out." Before long, leading blogs could have ethics guidelines and prominently posted corrections policies.

Before I start banging my head on the table about asking someone who, at her peak, was more Lloyd Grove than Edward R. Murrow, about the intersection of journalism and blogging, let's move to the point of the story:

But the real reason for an ethical upgrade is that it is the right way to do journalism, online or offline. As blogs grow in readers and influence, bloggers should realize that if they want to reform the American media, that is going to have to include reforming themselves.

I'm not a journalist. I frequently do research to argue a point, and include it, but my job is not to report, and I don't want that to be my job. I do believe that bloggers should be honest, but I also have to note that bloggers are not nearly as monolithic as the national media - we have no problem savaging each other. The "blogosphere" isn't "self-correcting", but blogs are just as critical of each other as they are of journalists. The coverage of blogs, however, not only misses this, but frequently fails to do the same ethical (or even sensical) checks on blogs that they themselves demand. Why else would Ana Marie Cox, who doesn't actually blog anymore, still be the most frequently quoted liberal political blogger (despite, at this point, all three of those descriptions being inaccurate)?

Ah, well. At this point, I'm just rambling, trying to figure out why telling the media that "he said, she said"-ism is a shitty way of doing journalism in fact requires me to get an official quote from Tom DeLay before I run with a post, based on information from, say, the NYT, based on a direct quote from him?

-Jesse Taylor