Over on iFlipFlop, Frank announces the Pulitzer Prize winners and writes:
I’ve been thinking for a while that all this belly button gazing by bloggers is a bit much. Do people actually think that when they started radio that early adopters spent all their time focused on the telegraph crowd? Or that the first drivers of cars spent all their time worrying about the supposed injustices perpetrated by horse riders? Or that Jack Parr, Red Skelton, and Milton Berle spent all their early TV time worrying about the radio “MSM”? Hardly.
It seems so juvenile to keep focusing on the “MSM,” or media bias, or whatever. Maybe the kids could learn a thing or two from the progenitors. The way to really get accepted isn’t to spend time complaining about not being at the grown-up table. Every once in a while it might behoove the kids to act mature and stop whining. If you want to be a professional, be one. Complaining about others who are doesn’t make you one.
Though I think he makes an important point, I disagree with this sentiment entirely. He’s right that bloggers have a lot to learn from journalists. I don’t blame professional journalists for reminding us that we depend on their hard work for material, because we often do.
But people are reading blogs because some journalists seem to have forgotten the art of investigative journalism. When Judy Miller of the NY Times takes Bush administration/Curveball lies and prints them as facts on the front page of the New York Times, someone has to stand up and yell bullshit. It certainly isn’t going to be the newspapers themselves.
When bloggers continue to be ridiculed in the main-stream media, there is an important discussion to be had.
When it takes a blogger to google the name of a Shiavo protester to find out that said protester is actually a registered sex offender, there is an important discussion to be had.
When it takes a group of bloggers to break a story about Gannon/Guckert, there is an important discussion to be had.
And when television news stations abandon the real issues to give 24/7 coverage to the Pope, Terri Shiavo, and Michael Jackson, there is definitely an important discussion to be had.
As that discussion continues, though, it’s important to note that neither blogs nor journalists are all alike. In fact, some bloggers are journalists (or is it that some journalists are bloggers?).
We bloggers want the respect that journalists get (yes, journalists, I hear you laughing), but we also want to print cartoons of Calvin taking a whiz or curse-filled rants when we feel like it. I don’t blame professional journalists for telling us that we can’t have it both ways.
Except that we can.
And that, my friends, sums up the beauty of blogging in a nutshell.
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6 Comments on "Street Cred"
Martin:
Sing it, sista!
Rod:
I think there’s something else that’s important to note about blogs, besides the fact that they’re reviving something dormant in the arena of investigative journalism. The media as it is currently constituted seems to have swallowed whole the agenda that has been handed to it. There has been no attempt by the conventional media either to change that agenda or to intervene in any other way. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard an interview on NPR or read an Op-Ed in the NYT where I’ve found myself yelling, to noone in particular, “BUT WHAT ABOUT X?” It doesn’t seem that it should be that hard to speak the truth to power, but I guess that’s probably an incredibly naive thing to say. Somebody should be saying things like, “Why aren’t we talking about this,” and “Does this strike anybody else kind of funny,” and “Account for yourself, sir/madam,” and it used to be that journalists did that to a much greater extent and degree than they now do. It just so happens that we’re also at a technological moment when the little people can also start to ask some of those questions and give the agenda a little push. It’s like an insurgency of sorts, although that word has come to mean only one thing lately.
Frank:
Matt, I’ll take my whoopin’. You make great points, and I did a poor job of explaining myself. I think blogs provide a great and valuable service, your example prove that Q.E.D. I guess what I tried to say (unsuccessfully, I might add) is that I read a lot of blogs about blogging. Even what I often consider “good blogs” have this funny, redheaded step-child thing going.
My sense is dong good journalism, or news analysis, or synthesizing, is all valuable. Doing that as a person or entity that looks like it deserves to be with the big boys makes it so. Call people on the carpet, make things clear, influence public opinion, give some a frown…or a smile. Those are all valuable. Being enemy focused isn’t.
So, that’s my long-winded part of a response. The beauty of blogging is that it’s real communication. I wrote that opinion. You built on it. Others commented. I responded. Heck, you probably will even comment back. And see, the MSM had nothing to do with it.
Please keep up the good work. We have miles to go before we sleep.
Matt:
no whoopin’ intended, Frank–I thought you had a valid point about what Wolcott once called “the enveloping racket of the increasingly ego-berserk blogosphere.”
I’m just cranky because I can’t remember where I put my taxes (seriously–I’m tearing my house apart right now).
update: I found them, I found them!
After this, there is no doubt in my mind that I was meant to become a professor.
Frank:
Wow, the tax thing, yeah, I know that. We’re assebling our business taxs, but with an LLC all the tex flows through to the members (owners), so we have this double-up issue. Yikes. I hope you’ve found the material by now. Thanks for expanding my thinking…it’s always good dialog.
dragonballyee:
i wonder how something like Bluffton Today will blur the blog/journalist line even further. many journalists have blogs and one blogger has received a WH press pass. what’s next?
and on taxes, i already got my [measly] return! sweetness. that’s one less headache on my palatte. good luck with yours.
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