July 29, 2004

Blogs Aren't Journalism. They're Better Than That

From a generally pretty good story on blogs, politics and journalism in the Thursday Seattle Post-Intelligencer comes this snippet that I want to comment on:

Bloggers and others have mixed opinions on what kind and how much of a threat this new type of journalism is to traditional media outlets.

"I don't know how you guys stay in the game except by analysis, so you're going to become a giant collection of opinion pages," said Hugh Hewitt, a blogger at the convention who is also a radio talk show host and author.

"No matter what you do, it will not appear until tomorrow morning -- and whenever you stop writing, the world can change after that. What I do is immediate, which is why it is preferable. To the extent that people want news, they want it immediately. No matter what you do, it's day-old bread," said Hewitt, who operates the site hughhewitt.com.

Most bloggers, unlike traditional media outlets, don't have the resources to research and publish in-depth investigative stories. And many bloggers rely on newspapers and magazines for their information.

1. Hewitt is right.

2. Oh, spare me. Most bloggers, unlike traditional media outlets, actually know how to use the Internet and Google to find out most any fact they seek. Most bloggers, unlike traditional media outlets, actually know where to find things online - things like interview transcripts, audio archives of speeches, corporate financial documents, and so on. Most bloggers, unlike traditional media outlets, provide links to the documents they cite so that readers are able to fact-check the bloggers' post against the source material.

Sure, some bloggers rely on newspapers and magazines for their information, but even there the activity is journalistic in nature - cross-checking one publication's stories against another's to root out factual errors. Other bloggers rely on original documents and other source materials to fact-check media coverage. Both are journalism, where the reporting beat is reporting on journalism itself.

A case in point. Last year, the mainstream press was allowing Joe Wilson to claim he was "apolitical" as the former ambassador publicly undermined President Bush's assertion in a state of the Union address that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. Many bloggers noted that the press often misquoted or misrepresented Bush's 16 words in that speech:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Some left off the first 5 words - "The British government has learned," altering the quote from one in which Bush reported what British intelligence believed and falsely portraying it as solely a Bush administration claim.

Others noted that the press seemed not to notice the difference between "Africa" and "Niger," as Wilson only claimed to have debunked a report that Saddam had sought uranium from that one small African country.

The blogosphere did a good job exposing the inaccuracies in the mainstream press coverage.

(Bush's 16-word statement was completely factual the day he said it and today. Recent developments in the story have completely vindicated the claim itself – and outed Wilson as an intentional liar. The Senate Intelligence Committee report said Wilson's trip to Niger in fact DID turn up evidence supporting the British intelligence report of Saddam seeking to purchase uranium from Niger. And a British probe recently concluded that Saddam indeed DID try to buy uranium from Niger.)

While much of the blogosphere focused on the press coverage of the 16 words, I added some real journalistic probing into Wilson's claim that he was "apolitical."

I used Google to find archived audio of a speech Wilson had given earlier in which he clearly staked out a political anti-war stance. And, thanks to Google, I found archived audio of a second speech in which Wilson also gave a highly political attack on the Iraq war. Apolitical? Wilson claimed it and the mainstream press let him get away with it. Had they used Google and done some actual research they could have reported that. And perhaps, by exposing Wilson early on as lying about being "apolitical," they might have raised some red flags about his overall credibility.

We might not have had to wait a year to find out that Wilson was lying, for political reasons, all along.

Will all their resources, the mainstream press didn't out Wilson as a liar. I did. And as a result, readers got more truth here than they did from the likes of the New York Times.

Doesn't the mainstream press have a subscription to Google?