Your Thoughts Exactly

So, I'm reading the Sports Guy, and he's running a strange feature where he e-mails Chuck Klosterman back and forth until they feel like SG has enough material for a column. In it, though, they take a few jabs at the blogsphere and the 'New Media'.

I've been wanting to blog about this for a long time but never really quite got around to it. And by this, I mean this nagging feeling of blogging being too easy. It's so easy, in fact, that I've managed to write around a hundred posts in not much more than a year. To a large degree, yes, they're right. It's easy to link up a post at CNN or something, bemoan the state of the world, and then criticize the media coverage of it. It's easy to write a short blurb about what went wrong with the response to Katrina, and it's easy to accuse the President of not caring about black people. It's easy to write what I'm writing right now. Why? It's because there's no accountability. I've definitely made mistakes, and I definitely haven't corrected all of them. But I don't have an editor or a fact-checking staff to back me up, and so I'm allowed to make mistakes. I'm just a random person, who's posting his thoughts on the internet.

Remember when Dan Rather got taken down a few pegs because of posting a false story on President Bush? The blogging world was on fire because of that. In fact, they even took credit for it in the first place. And the Old Media lambasted the blogs because they were telling Rather to have some journalistic integrity, when they themselves had none to begin with. And no, I don't have it either, but I've definitely pointed out instances where I thought Old Media was going wrong. And I think that's what we need to do.

I have said before that I think our blog (although certainly not all blogs) functions best as a sort of filter through which to view the media. And that's all. I've never done any original research, I've never gone out and interviewed people. Marmar has gone to New Orleans (which was perhaps why his recent post was the most worthy of being 'real'), but in large part this blog deals with the world on a second-hand basis. It is, after all, a virtual space. But we don't try and make any claims to be the source, and not the filter. Sometimes blogs blur this line and publish rumors and innuendo. But the problem is that when this line gets blurred the blog thinks of itself not as a filter but rather as the gospel. And that indeed is a big problem, because it enables people to think that by visiting certain blogs, they are getting the real story.

But this is not to say that the Old Media isn't already filtering through their own lenses, be they liberal, conservative, pro-war, anti-war, etc. But because they have "Journalistic Integrity" (and I'll just take an aside here for the obligatory Fox News joke), at least they're trying; and at least they have some standards in place. But who holds those standards accountable? The news outlets say they have a respect for the truth- and yes, it may be true that Laci Peterson is dead, or that Michael Jackson is a weirdo, but is that a truth that needs to be trumpeted across the entire US? If you want the blogs to respect your standards, perhaps the standards need to be respectable.

In any case, I would go so far as to say that the blogging world isn't 'media' at all in the Fourth Estate sense of the word. The blogs should merely be a discussion, a true free market of ideas, not taken as the truth; yet still respected because of what they represent. And you know what? It's our responsibility to get upset when the Old Media bends the rules, or gives us stupid regurgitated nonsense about a runaway bride and a girl disappearing in Aruba. Because while blogging is easy, it sure looks like the traditional news outlets (another phrase to exclude blogs) are getting pretty lazy over on their side as well.

Ahh... blogging about blogging. you've obviously got to take this seriously.