My compadre Tom Watson has a great post today on all the blogophilic back-slapping going on over the role of blogs and bloggers in the Dan Rather reporting scandal.
As usual Tom got it mostly right. Harry MacDougald's deconstruction of the typeface used in the disputed memos passed through the Internet like a plate of bad clams. That network effect velocity certainly gave his blog-posted critique more attention that it might have gotten in another scenario, say had it been passed around similar but less cybercentric partisan circles and ultimately been given an airing some other way-- a letter to all the major news media, a phone call to Rush Limbaugh. But the distinction that it was posted to a blog and passed around the Internet is neither revolutionary nor big news. It reminds me of the days when Tom and I and our Cybertimes editor Rob Fixmer laughed at how all the non-tech editors at the Times fell for the gee whiz stories--hey, you can buy stuff on the Internet! Hey, you can find a date on the Internet! Hey, you can question the accuracy of a CBS news story on the Internet!
That CBS News apparently got snowed by forged memos is a valid, newsworthy story. (Unfortunately for the profession I once practiced, scandalously bad journalism has become a chronic disease--Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, The NYT reporting in the Wen Ho Lee case, everybody's single-sourced, Chalabi-planted phony Iraq WMD stories, the Vietnam nerve gas story CNN ran a few years back, Judith Cooke's Pulitzer Prize winner about an 8-year-old heroin addict who never existed).
Credit for the forensic typography should be duly given to MacDougald (unless he's the source of the forgeries or knows the source of the forgeries...nothing would surprise me anymore), but it's not an unusual way for bad journalism to surface--to have a reader or viewer call to someone's attention the flaws in a report. The glee in the blogosphere over the fact that it happened among bloggers is the kind of gee whiz reaction I would have expected from "Big Media" back in 1996!
Blogging does not represent a media revolution. It is an evolutionary step forward in form but not function from Usenet and listserv, the tools we used in the early days to further distribution of asynchronous news, information, and conversation on a variety of subjects. Those tools did spark the creation of a citizens media--something Tom has written about both knowledgeably and passionately for years in @NY, The Industry Standard, inside.com. At least as early as June 1998 Tom wrote "this is not a mass medium but a medium of the masses." And I remember lecturing at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism around the same time, telling the nascent reporters that the nature of their jobs was going to change because soon everyone would be reporting the facts of their own lives. In fact we were both right, and a platform for information and opinion that would otherwise not have an outlet did spring up as did a means by which geographically scattered audiences for niche information could be assembled. But, as Tom notes about the most-read blogs, web-published, national political commentary--identical in style and substance to what you hear on Cross-Fire or read in Commentary--by moonlighting professional journalists is hardly the harbinger of a profound change.
What Tom discounts however is the impact of blog self-publishing on traditional print media. Like all of Internet media, blogging creates competition by adding yet another new medium to divert eyeballs. And the better job blogs do in producing new information (not just commentary on someone else's information) the more of a diversion they will be. But unless people start charging for blogs the impact may be worse for the journalists than it will be for the media conglomerates. Through the magic of blogs journalists now get to do for free what they used to be paid to do!
Yes it's important and interesting that somone caught Dan Rather. No, it's not important, and it's only slightly interesting that the person published his "gotcha" on a blog.
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