Bloggers as Journalists

Lots of good posts out there on the FEC/blogger issue.

Cap'n Ed

caught my eye with his Jack Shafer Takes David Shaw to the Woodshed piece.

What I find completely bi-polar about Shaw’s and the MSM’s take on how much “free speech” bloggers should be allowed, is their reliance on the “fact checking” argument. I have no hope of taking Shaw to the hoop as effectively as Jack Shafer, but I can’t sit on my hands any longer.

“When I or virtually any other mainstream journalist writes something, it goes through several filters before the reader sees it. At least four experienced Times editors will have examined this column, for example. They will have checked it for accuracy, fairness, grammar, taste and libel, among other things.” (Shaw)

I am sorry, you mean those fact checkers who graduate from the most liberal programs of the most liberal universities in the country? The fact checkers who checked Jason Blair’s work? The fact checkers who have allowed the dozens of completely false stories to be filed, and in some cases win Pulitzer Prizes? Those fact checkers that shield us from dangerous conservative dogma everyday, and make it impossible to pick up a paper or watch the six o’clock news and get a balanced take on a story about conservatives, the President, or the war in Iraq? I fail to see where those “fact checkers” have done such a credible job that they are the torch bearers for the First Amendment, and that the rest of us keyboard killers require closer government scrutiny.

He glides past this crucial point by saying, “mistakes happen.” These have been found out to be, not mistakes, but determined efforts that can later be claimed to be mistakes. Blair was allowed to go on filing false stories long before he was kept from publishing and eventually terminated. Allowing a known fabricator to continue to publish is a “mistake”? Although no one says it out loud…Dan Rather’s publishing of the fake memos was an attempt to change the election. This is not a mistake…it was a deliberate act on his part and other players in the story to smear the President just weeks before the election. But it is covered up as a “mistake.”

Geez, I don’t know how fifty things could have gone wrong and we got this story onto the air…I just don’t know.

These are serious breaches in the trust that impact their First Amendment protection. You start breaching this trust (which they have) and you start eroding sanctity of your argument here. There is no “holier than thou” claim available to the MSM on this issue. So, unless the MSM can claim perfection, which they can’t, they are not in a different category, with sole claim to the protection of the First Amendment.


And when they do make legitimate mistakes, what does the MSM do to correct them? They put the correction in New Times Roman 6 in the middle of the Want Ads. How is this approach to “getting it right” preferable to the clear corrections I have seen on Blogs?

Akin to the mistake argument is the conscious lack of interest in pursuing stories that may cause the MSM to do damage control. The MSM, by ignoring these stories (Rathergate, Easongate, etc.), or being deliberately slow to react, prejudices their “unbiased” claims as they give a free pass to each other for lazy journalism. Lazy is the nicest word I can come up with. In reality, they are covering up these stories in an effort to protect their brethren. By ignoring these types of stories, or pursuing them with feigned interest, they give up their claim to the higher ground. They are no more credible than the worst of the bloggers, and they prove it time and again.

Shaw’s compliments to the blogoshpere only make my point.

“Certainly, some bloggers practice what anyone would consider "journalism" in its roughest form — they provide news. And just as surely, bloggers deserve credit for, among other things, being the first to discredit Dan Rather's use of documents of dubious origin and legitimacy to accuse President Bush of having received special treatment in the National Guard.” (Shaw)

How could lowly bloggers break Rathergate, when all of the resources of CBS couldn’t figure out what happened in four months? Maybe it stems from a true desire to get the truth out into the open, when the MSM is doing its best to keep it from happening. Who has the most credibility?

In the end, the question is who is making the best use of their First Amendment rights in getting the truth out to the public? Or bigger yet…what makes a journalist? Being employed by a paper or a station? I submit a journalist is someone who pursues the truth in any medium available to him, and does a credible job of doing it. If the NYT, LAT, CBS, WP are entitled to First Amendment protection what about Captain’s Quarters, Hugh Hewitt, Democracy Project and Major Mike? I think we’ve earned it, and I think they are squandering it.

© Michael McBride 2005