The Fifth Estate II
Pamela Troy, in her essay "When Ordinary is Not Enough" (as seen at Democratic Underground), talks about her incredulity at the Fourth Estate's unwillingness or inability to see anything at all wrong with the state of the union and its current administration, those over whom they claim an almost inalienable right to be the exclusive watchdogs. Its a simple question with complex answers, but her analysis makes a good start.
Near the end, she writes
It would have been nice if the Guckert/Gannon embarrassment had resulted in genuine soul-searching among the press about why this outrageous shill had gone undetected by the mainstream media even as he sat several feet away from reporters who are presumably the best and brightest of their profession. It could still happen. Maybe it will.
But don't bet on it.
Instead, what we're more likely to see is a powerful institution rising to its full height, drawing its robes about it, and loftily denouncing the hoi polloi for daring to question its competence. […]
Earlier in the week, I read a piece ("Who Watches the Watchdogs") by Ted Rall. He, speaking as a "real" journalists, seemed to have, at best, conflicted feelings, and at worst, some issues, with bloggers. Rightfully, he attacked the right-wing loudmouths for constantly repeating each other's empty ideas at the top of their metaphorical lungs; their purpose is to amplify, not to illuminate.
He sees the problems with the "mainstream media", but doesn't think it's a problem, and bloggers certainly aren't the solution:
Bloggers are ordinary people, many of them uneducated and with nothing interesting to say. They're sitting in their rec rooms, regurgitating and spinning what real journalists have dug up through hard work. They don't have sources, they don't report, and no one holds them accountable when they make mistakes or flat out lie.
It's curious. Ever since I read that, I've been a bit oversensitive about being dismissed as just sitting in my rec room (I'm actually upstairs in the loft), regurgitating (eeeuw) and spinning (commenting at least, but I hope going further than that) what "real journalists" (puh-lease) have dug up.
Because of it, I've been paying more attention to all the things that I read [admittedly] on line by all the elite "real" journalists, and I've made an amazing discovery which I will now regurgitate:
The MSM is spending an awful lot of its ink talking about bloggers and what's happening in the blogs and what the bloggers are saying and, largely, why they should either 1) be ignored; or 2) are not to be ignored.
Fascinating. (I identified with Mr. Spock in my formative years because of my pointy ears.) The "real journalists" are "digging up" their exclusive truths by reading blogs.
Here's interesting observation #2: when they're not talking about bloggers, the MSM is talking about all the stories that the MSM is not talking about (newspapers in different markets take turns blaming each other for sins of omission).
Where oh where would we be without "real" journalists to keep an eye on things like dirty Republican tricks, warmongering Presidential lies, election manipulation, smear campaigns, White House propaganda programs, tax give-aways for the wealthy, social security magic tricks. Thank goodnes for the reporting elite with their exclusive "sources", sources that seem mostly to be White-House briefing packets and press releases.
I'm afraid by this time — and this is a big lesson the of Gannon Affair, among others — that the MSM has lost quite a bit of credibility as "real" reporters of the "truth"; their role as exclusive "watchdogs" has been suspect for awhile. When most of the media are conservative corporate outlets, where's the independence that girds the loins of the journalist?
Remarkably, the answer to "who watches the watchdogs" in this case is as hard to see as the nose on the the MSM's face: everyone and anyone.
Since the bloggers, at least the ones who deal in facts, rarely have exclusive "sources" that they can't reveal to an interested public because of the traditions of their honorable profession, they must instead resort to investigating, revealing, and co-joining facts that, through the Internet, are verifiable to anyone who wishes to look.
Damn them! What a dangerous idea.
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on Saturday, 26 February 2005 at 00.12
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The mainstream media will get past this spate of concentrating on the blogosphere, which to them is a new and novel thing.
What they won't get past is an increasingly obvious reluctance to seriously examine certain things out of order in their own house. These include, but certainly aren't limited to: 1, overreliance on unnamed sources; 2, trotting along the same few paths in packs, so that each in the pack won't be the only one not covering something; and 3, basically selling out to the powers that be so access won't be lost.
Lastly, forgive a small bit of pickiness. Please, the word "media" is plural, "medium" is singular. So it would be MSM are doing such and such.