March 8, 2005

No Substitute For Journalism?

Here's yet another attack on blogging by mainstream journalism, this time by University of Maryland journalism professor Christopher Hanson, published in the March 7 Baltimore Sun.

BY UNCORKING the sex gossip that fueled President Bill Clinton's impeachment, Matt Drudge demonstrated the unsuspected power of independent Internet correspondents. Web loggers, or "bloggers," have been shaking up our politics and news media ever since. Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, for instance, resigned as Senate Republican leader in 2002 after bloggers raised the roof when he made a racist remark in a speech carried on C-SPAN.

More recently, bloggers hastened Dan Rather's retirement as CBS news anchor by questioning the authenticity of documents he had relied on in a report critical of President Bush.

Blogger agitation also led CNN News Chief Eason Jordan to resign last month for supposedly stating without evidence that U.S. troops had, in effect, executed journalists in Iraq.

There is no denying that the bloggers are a powerful force in the information world.

But at least for now, they are no substitute for mainstream journalism, despite its flaws. A great many bloggers are either too self-absorbed to focus on keeping the public informed or too skewed by ideology to put factual accuracy front and center.

First, to the "I Bloggers," who owe less to Watergate investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein than to the recently deceased Hunter S. Thompson. His "gonzo" journalism focused on the writer's precious idiosyncrasies, not on fact digging, and the Blogosphere, too, is a wilderness of self-absorption.

Case in point: "The Dawn Patrol," Manhattanite Dawn Eden's preening report on Dawn Eden, iconoclastic neoconservative "petite powerhouse," illustrated with Dawn Eden glamour photos.

Case in point: "Scottie and Me," anti-Bush blogger Russell Mokhiber's compendium of White House briefing excerpts in which he asks questions that reek of misplaced self-righteousness; to wit, has the press secretary considered quitting the Bush team on grounds of conscience?

Dawn Eden's blog is small - fewer than 300 other blogs link to it, according to Technorati, which tracks such things. According to her "Extreme Tracking" stats tracker she gets about 21,000 unique visitors per month.

Powerline - the blog that played the central role in exposing CBS's documents as forgeries - by contrast, is linked to by more than 6,500 other blogs, according to Technorati, and gets more than 447,653 unique visitors on average per month, according to Extreme Tracking.

Russell Mokhiber's blog is hardly worth mentioning. Just 12 blogs link to it, as of today, according to Technorati, and the site has no publicly accessible stats tracker.

So, the writer of this attack on bloggers held up as his examples two tiny blogs that were uninvolved in the blogosphere's questioning of CBS, played no role in the Eason Jordan story, and get very few readers compared to the blogs that were involved in those stories.

Is this what Prof. Hanson teaches his journalism students? To find irrelevant examples and ignore the real players in a story?

Not every I Blogger is overtly exhibitionistic. James D. Guckert - on whom the president relied for blatantly pro-Bush news conference questions - hid behind the alias "Jeff Gannon" until left-leaning online scribes unmasked him recently as a one-time nude escort service model.

Many of the best journalists have impact because they expose serious abuses of power, as in Watergate, by painstakingly verifying their facts. But, perversely enough, bloggers' impact often derives from reckless impatience - a rush to shoot first and verify later, usually driven by ideological zeal.

Take Clinton-hater Drudge, whose online "scoop" about the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky was essentially a rumor. Because the story later turned out to be true, Mr. Drudge suddenly was elevated to media icon, kitchen table giant killer, radio and TV star. No matter that he had also reported a series of false rumors. One can't expect a cyber-cowboy to match the standards that apply to a Dan Rather!

Ideology draws many into the Blogosphere, where Lynch Bloggers, driven to cast political enemies in a bad light, too often fail to sift rumor from verifiable fact.

Consider the Eason Jordan affair. Even today it is unclear precisely what the CNN exec said, or intended to say, during a January panel discussion in Switzerland. Mr. Jordan insisted afterward that he had meant U.S. soldiers had recklessly targeted individuals, not knowing they were journalists. But a sketchy Web posting by a conference participant said Mr. Jordan had accused soldiers of deliberate journocide. No transcript was available.

There may be no transcript but - as Hanson fails to tell his readers - there IS a video, although CNN, Jordan and the mainstream media steadfastly refused to call for its release.

Even so, a brigade of conservative bloggers, incensed by CNN's "liberal bias," bellowed for Mr. Jordan's blood and got it, vigilante style, with the facts still murky - an approach that would have resulted in failing grades in any journalism school.

The main bloggers pushing the Eason Jordan story were adamant in calling for release of the video tape in order to determine what, exactly, Jordan said. They were not, in the main, calling for Jordan's resignation. Most of the bloggers leading the charge on the Eason Jordan story weren't calling for his "blood" or his resignation, but were calling for the tape to be released so that the truth could be known. And - unlike the mainstream media that Prof. Hanson is working so hard to defend - bloggers also tracked down a variety of first-hand witnesses to Jordan's talk and interviewed them and published their version of events. In other words, the bloggers did journalism.

Lynch Bloggers want to have big-league journalistic impact but to avoid ethical standards they apply so vigorously to mainstream reporters.

The Blogosphere does wonders as a forum for debate, political and social "networking" and wild creative expression. But it is not realizing its potential to backstop mainstream news coverage with solid, factual grass-roots journalism - the kind most acutely required where cash-strapped, short-staffed newspapers fail to scrutinize government and business while ratings-crazed TV stations chase carnage.

What we need now is a critical mass of citizen cyber-reporters sufficiently mature to realize the world does not revolve around them and sufficiently conscientious to insist on earning their influence through meticulous reporting.

Christopher Hanson teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Let's hope he's teaching better journalism than this column of his shows he practices.