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February 15, 2005
The Mob Times
: I thought we'd be moving past l'affaires' Jordan and "Gannon" today -- I'm jealous of Jay Rosen's certainty when he headlined his latest good post "Closing Thoughts on the Resignation of Eason Jordan" -- but there is more to say about this story, in part because some are trying to make blogs the story rather than Jordan or the White House or the powerful.
Some are trying to call blogs a "lynch mob." Here's what I said in reply to that yesterday on MSNBC:
If seeking truth from power is the action of a lynch mob, then all of journalism is a lynch mob and welcome to it.
We've also heard efforts to call this "McCarthyism."
Well now, that's ludicrous on so many levels, even the definitional: If anyone practiced that thankfully dead art, it could be argued it was Jordan because he as much as held up an unseen piece of paper and said, I have a list; he said he knew something we didn't. He then backtracked and backtracked again because he was questioned by people who demanded to know what he said and what he knew. If a tough reporter did that, would it be "McCarthyism" or "journalism." It's journalism, people.
Now here's Hardblogger calling bloggers -- fellow bloggers, it would seem by the title, no? -- the "Taliban of the American media" and the "Gang of Four." This comes from Chris Matthews' show called Hardball where the goal is to ask hard questions of power. If that's journalism, so is this, eh?
At home, I have an old post that William Randolph Hearst hung on the walls of his newsrooms to remind his reporters of their jobs; I'll dig it up and quote it tomorrow. For now, though, etch this in brass and hang it on the newsroom -- and J-school -- wall:
Welcome to the new world of journalism, where every witness to news can report the news, thanks to the internet; where every citizen can question the powerful, thanks to the internet; where every speaker can be a pundit, thanks to the internet. Journalism is no longer the closed society of the gatekeepers. Journalism can no longer just lecture; now it must listen. News is freed from the limitations of paper and schedules and reporters' pens. Journalists should welcome the help, for journalists should believe that more information yields a more informed society and that is our goal.
So why are some of these journalists attacking the bloggers with such spittle and spite, with the kind of invective they usually try to keep out of their columns (Steve Lovelady called us not just a lynch mob but "salivating morons," stooping to the level of intelligence, subtlety, nuance, and articulation of an Oliver Willis fuss)? Yes, it's jealousy. Yes, it's fear. But it's also truly about not understanding how this world could possibly operate. These are the people who used to control the news and they think it's now uncontrolled; they think that's bad. Listen to Lovelady after he took his meds:
But it's no longer the Jeff Jarvises or the David Gergens or Journal editorial writers who drive these matters to a conclusion. It's the headless mob.
Some think that's a good thing, others see anarchy unloosed. As for us, we're with Gergen and the Wall Street Journal editorial writer. This one is not a case of the wisdom of crowds; it's a case of the madness of crowds.
You got it reversed, my friend. The head isn't the journalists. The head isn't the politicians. The head is the people.
We work for the public. We serve the public. The public is our boss. Remember?
If you don't believe the public is capable of that -- if you don't believe in the wisdom of the crowd -- then (I've said it before and, be warned, I'll say it again) you don't believe in democracy or free markets or reformed religion or art. If you think you're smarter and better than the people, you set yourself up for a fall -- especially today, when the people own the press.
Are there bloggers who get so mad they issue spittle and spite? Sure (heck, look at Lovelady himself). But are all bloggers like that? Do you judge the society by its worst? There are journalists who make mistakes and even lie and cheat. Do you judge the profession by its worst? Are there New Yorkers who murder? Do you judge the city by its worst? Out of fear, you do.
If anyone's going too far these days, I think it is the few -- and I emphasize few -- who are still digging to destroy "Gannon" after he's already toast (I do not approve of the old-style tabloid vindictiveness going on in some of the links in the comments). They forget that their real target is not this jerk, "Gannon." It is the White House. Remember: Question the powerful.
In the case of Jordan, we bloggers questioned the powerful and apparently the powerful didn't have an answer; if they had, CNN would not have gotten rid of him. Where there's smoke, there's often fire -- but not necessarily from lynch-mob torches.
Should we bloggers and we journalists keep watch on each other to improve the quality of discourse and the reliability of the reporting? You bet. That's what these journalists are trying to do with bloggers. And that's what the bloggers were trying to do with CNN.
But I can't resist noting whose language -- lynch mob, McCarthyism, Taliban, Gang of Four, morons -- was the more fiery and who sounded more like a lynch mob.
: See also: Howard Kurtz: "The power of the blogosphere, I'd suggest, is not in raw numbers but in ideas that garner attention."
: See also: Charlie Madigan in the Chicago Tribune:
Shut up with your whining and appreciate the fact that after generations of stagnation, something new has arrived....
So, they all get to climb up on a pedestal now and thump their chests and prounounce, "Got another one!"
This isn't going to stop and I would argue, even more uncomfortably, that it shouldn't.
What new media gets to do now is exactly what old media got to do back when it was new media, which is work out how it is going to be.
Salivating lynch mobs February 15, 2005 | 5:10 PM ET
As discussed below Eason Jordan has resigned, and now a lot of folks in Big Media are getting nervous. For some, their nervousness tends to manifest itself as anger.
The New York Times quoted Steve Lovelady of the Columbia Journalism Review:
"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail," he lamented online after Mr. Jordan's resignation.
Not surprisingly, these intemperate remarks were widely circulated around the blogosphere, and to many wound up symbolizing the Big Media take on Eason Jordan's resignation -- though, in fact, most bloggers would rather have seen the still-secret Davos video of Jordan's remarks made public than see Jordan's resignation. (CNN, on the other hand, had different priorities.) Blogger Ed Morrissey, though, corresponded with Lovelady and noted that the Times quote didn't represent Lovelady's views of all bloggers, and that Lovelady planned to clarify things -- on his blog. But of course!
Tom Maguire, meanwhile, notes that the Big Media are, strangely, spinning this as a blog story without mentioning some key non-blog players:
In the course of emphasizing that the Eason Jordan lynching was engineered by a right wing mob, the Times somehow drops from this story (a) Howard Kurtz of the WaPo, who offers some relatively real coverage here; Rep. Barney Frank, D, MA, who made a cameo appearance in the audience in the Times' Saturday story (yes, of course he was on the panel); and Sen. Chris Dodd, D, CT, who has now failed to appear in both of the stories offered by the Times, despite his expressions of outrage and calls for the release of the videotape. What does a Democrat from neighboring Connecticut need to do to break into the Times?
On the other hand, Jordan's defenders -- like David Gergen on the PBS Newshour -- keep stressing that Jordan lost his job for a single mis-statement. But in fact, he's been making unsupported accusations against U.S. troops for some time, as this article from The Guardian notes:
Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, said there had been only a "limited amount of progress", despite repeated meetings between news organisations and the US authorities.
"Actions speak louder than words. The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the US military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by US forces," Mr Jordan told an audience of news executives at the News Xchange conference in Portugal.
That sounds like a huge story, but CNN hasn't reported it. Should a top executive at a major network make accusations like this, in wartime, with no backup? CNN has apparently decided that the answer is "no."
In the more paranoid -- or at least more cynical -- portions of the blogosphere, there has been speculation that news media organizations will try to "get" a leading blogger or two. This would be a dumb move, sort of like North Korea invading China, and for the same reason: Both are wildly outnumbered. (But, too, both have been known to make dumb moves in the past...) The blogosphere is huge and decentralized, and most bloggers blog as hobbies, meaning that you can't get them fired from blogging anyway. And if you got them fired from their day jobs, they'd just be able to blog full-time.
Besides, some Big Media folks get it. The Chicago Tribune's Charlie Madigan writes:
It all reminds me of a mix of what I have read about genuinely robust periods in American journalism, the era of the pamphleteers back before everything became so formal, the "yellow kids" era, when the media barons of the 19th and early 20th Centuries were carving up the pie, and maybe the birth of TV, when no one quite knew what to put on the screen.
The difference is that, in those eras, it took decades before media became self-referential enough to develop ethics and standards and journalism schools and thoughtful journals that would deconstruct every aspect of this messy business. Because the medium of blogging is speed-of-light stuff, we have become self-referential and obsessive about what happens well ahead of the historical curve.
Howard Kurtz gets it, too:
I lean toward the view that the rise of blogs is a healthy development and is forcing the MSM (how did the mainstream media get stuck with a three-letter initial?) to become more accountable, rather than display their old we-stand-by-our-story arrogance. There is, to be sure, plenty of partisan noise and mean-spirited attacks out there, but also a lot of thoughtful and ground-breaking posting on stories, or angles, either missed or minimized by the MSM types.
...
After all, bloggers can form all the lynch mobs they want, but if they don't have the factual goods, or an issue that resonates, their targets will slip the noose.
And law professor/blogger Eugene Volokh writes that we're not seeing "lynch mobs," but "persuasion bunches:"
Now I realize that "lynch mob" is figurative, and hyperbole at that.
Still, figurative references and analogies (even hyperbolic ones) only make sense to the extent that the analogy is apt -- to the extent that the figurative usage, while literally false, reflects a deeper truth.
The trouble is that here the analogy is extremely weak. What's wrong with lynch mobs? It's that the mob itself has the power to kill. They could be completely wrong, and entirely unpersuasive to reasonable people or to the rest of the public. Yet by their physical power, they can impose their will without regard to the law.
But bloggers, or critics generally, have power only to the extent that they are persuasive. Jordan's resignation didn't come because he was afraid that bloggers will fire him. They can't fire him. I assume that to the extent the bloggers' speech led him to resign, it did so by persuading the public that he wasn't trustworthy.
So Jordan's critics (bloggers or not) aren't a lynch mob: If they're a mob, they're at most a "persuasion mob." What's more, since they're generally a very small group, they're really a "persuasion bunch."
Maybe if a persuasion bunch tries to persuade people by using factual falsehoods, they could be faulted on those grounds (though that too has little to do with lynch mobs). But I've seen no evidence that their criticisms were factually unfounded, or that Jordan quit because of any factual errors in the criticisms. (Plus presumably releasing the video of the panel would have been the best way to fight the factual errors.) We should love persuasion bunches, who operate through peaceful persuasion, while hating lynch mobs, who operate through violence and coercion. What's more, journalists -- to the extent that they love the First Amendment's premise that broad public debate helps discover the truth, and improve society -- ought to love persuasion bunches, too.
That seems right to me. I'd still like to see the Davos video, though.
The MSM is used to shaping public opinion. Every day that controlled world slips further into the past.Kathianne said:Welcome to the new world of journalism, where every witness to news can report the news, thanks to the internet; where every citizen can question the powerful, thanks to the internet; where every speaker can be a pundit, thanks to the internet. Journalism is no longer the closed society of the gatekeepers. Journalism can no longer just lecture; now it must listen. News is freed from the limitations of paper and schedules and reporters' pens. Journalists should welcome the help, for journalists should believe that more information yields a more informed society and that is our goal.
So why are some of these journalists attacking the bloggers with such spittle and spite, with the kind of invective they usually try to keep out of their columns (Steve Lovelady called us not just a lynch mob but "salivating morons," stooping to the level of intelligence, subtlety, nuance, and articulation of an Oliver Willis fuss)? Yes, it's jealousy. Yes, it's fear. But it's also truly about not understanding how this world could possibly operate. These are the people who used to control the news and they think it's now uncontrolled; they think that's bad.
onedomino said:The MSM is used to shaping public opinion. Every day that controlled world slips further into the past.
PEGGY NOONAN
The Blogs Must Be Crazy
Or maybe the MSM is just suffering from freedom envy.
Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:01 a.m.
"Salivating morons." "Scalp hunters." "Moon howlers." "Trophy hunters." "Sons of Sen. McCarthy." "Rabid." "Blogswarm." "These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people."
This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers!
Those MSMers have gone wild, I tell you! The tendentious language, the low insults. It's the Wild Wild West out there. We may have to consider legislation.
When you hear name-calling like what we've been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don't have a serious case of freedom envy.
The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn't. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.
But MSM criticism of the blogosphere misses the point, or rather points.
Blogging changes how business is done in American journalism. The MSM isn't over. It just can no longer pose as if it is The Guardian of Established Truth. The MSM is just another player now. A big one, but a player.
The blogosphere isn't some mindless eruption of wild opinion. That isn't their power. This is their power:
1. They use the tools of journalists (computer, keyboard, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to ask the question) and of the Internet (Google, LexisNexis) to look for and find facts that have been overlooked, ignored or hidden. They look for the telling quote, the ignored statistic, the data that have been submerged. What they are looking for is information that is true. When they get it they post it and include it in the debate. This is a public service.
2. Bloggers, unlike reporters at elite newspapers and magazines, are independent operators. They are not, and do not have to be, governed by mainstream thinking. Nor do they have to accept the directives of an editor pushing an ideology or a publisher protecting his friends. Bloggers have the freedom to decide on their own when a story stops being a story. They get to decide when the search for facts is over. They also decide on their own when the search for facts begins. It was a blogger at the World Economic Forum, as we all know, who first reported the Eason Jordan story. It was bloggers, as we all know, who pursued it. Matt Drudge runs a news site and is not a blogger, but what was true of him at his beginning (the Monica Lewinsky story, he decided, is a story) is true of bloggers: It's a story if they say it is. This is a public service.
3. Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: "Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report." In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that's new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That's not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn't carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago. In the old days a lot of interesting information fell off the editing desk in this way. Now it doesn't. This is a public service.
4. Bloggers are also selling the smartest take on a story. They're selling an original insight, a new area of inquiry. Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles has his bright take, Andrew Sullivan had his, InstaPundit has his. They're all selling their shrewdness, experience, depth. This too is a public service.
5. And they're doing it free. That is, the Times costs me a dollar and so does the Journal, but Kausfiles doesn't cost a dime. This too is a public service. Some blogs get their money from yearly fund-raising, some from advertisers, some from a combination, some from a salary provided by Slate or National Review. Most are labors of love. Some bloggers--a lot, I think--are addicted to digging, posting, coming up with the bright phrase. OK with me. Some get burned out. But new ones are always coming up, so many that I can't keep track of them and neither can anyone else.
But when I read blogs, when I wake up in the morning and go to About Last Night and Lucianne and Lileks, I remember what the late great Christopher Reeve said on "The Tonight Show" 20 years ago. He was the second guest, after Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield did his act and he was hot as a pistol. Then after Reeve sat down Dangerfield continued to be riotous. Reeve looked at him, gestured toward him, looked at the audience and said with grace and delight, "Do you believe this is free?" The audience cheered. That's how I feel on their best days when I read blogs.
That you get it free doesn't mean commerce isn't involved, for it is. It is intellectual commerce. Bloggers give you information and point of view. In return you give them your attention and intellectual energy. They gain influence by drawing your eyes; you gain information by lending your eyes. They become well-known and influential; you become entertained or informed. They get something from it and so do you.
6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web.
There are blogs that carry political and ideological agendas. But everyone is on to them and it's mostly not obnoxious because their agendas are mostly declared.
7. I don't know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pierson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and '40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don't know how Walter Lippman or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they'd lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them--but, well, too bad. I've been attacked. Too bad. If you can't take it, you shouldn't be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.
I conclude with a few predictions.
Some brilliant rising young reporter with a growing reputation at the Times or Newsweek or Post is going to quit, go into the blogging business, start The Daily Joe, get someone to give him a guaranteed ad for two years, and become a journalistic force. His motive will be influence, and the use of his gifts along the lines of excellence. His blog will further legitimize blogging.
Most of the blogstorms of the past few years have resulted in outcomes that left and right admit or bray were legitimate. Dan Rather fell because his big story was based on a fabrication, Trent Lott said things that it could be proved he said. But coming down the pike is a blogstorm in which the bloggers turn out to be wrong. Good news: They'll probably be caught and exposed by bloggers. Bad news: It will show that blogging isn't nirvana, and its stars aren't foolproof. But then we already know that, don't we?
Some publisher is going to decide that if you can't fight blogs, you can join them. He'll think like this: We're already on the Internet. That's how bloggers get and review our reporting. Why don't we get our own bloggers to challenge our work? Why don't we invite bloggers who already exist into the tent? Why not take the best things said on blogs each day and print them on a Daily Blog page? We'd be enhancing our rep as an honest news organization, and it will further our branding!
Someone is going to address the "bloggers are untrained journalists" question by looking at exactly what "training," what education in the art/science/craft/profression of journalism, the reporters and editors of the MSM have had in the past 60 years or so. It has seemed to me the best of them never went to J-school but bumped into journalism along the way--walked into a radio station or newspaper one day and found their calling. Bloggers signify a welcome return to that old style. In journalism you learn by doing, which is what a lot of bloggers are doing.
Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of the country are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they're going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it's there, most heartening information from . . . some lone blogger out there. And then another. They're going to do some big work down the road.
