The Land of Make-Believe
Romenesko links to a USA Today story in which Tom McPhail, a journalism professor, calls bloggers “pretend journalists” because “they thrive on rumor and innuendo.”
What does this mean? It’s not as if perfectly legitimate newspapers don’t run stories based on rumors. They will generally qualify these stories so that the reader knows where the information comes from, but that’s exactly what good blogs do as well: provide links to their sources. Linking is the whole idea behind blogs, in fact.
Is McPhail concerned that bloggers are biased? That can’t be the only sticking point. Every newspaper in the country publishes a number of opinion columnists in its pages without qualms. These people are paid to be biased. Many of the most popular opinion columnists in the world are tremendously slanted one way or another in their perceptions of the world. Surely McPhail doesn’t consider George Will or Andy Rooney a “pretend” journalist, and certainly there would be very few objections if they were given press credentials to the Democratic National Convention.
Furthermore, the bloggers given credentials were not selected randomly. There are, unquestionably, tens of thousands of bloggers out there who can’t write their way out of a paper bag and shouldn’t be chosen to cover an event like a political party’s national convention. The ones chosen are, by and large, writers for or authors of well-respected blogs (James Landrith has a list of the invitees he knows of) who can be trusted to give an, if not unbiased, at least thorough and well-written look at the events that take place during the convention.
McPhail strikes me as a stodgy proponent of old media, unwilling to admit that the way people communicate is changing at blinding speeds, and unable to keep up with that change. By ridiculing new media as “pretend,” McPhail hopes his academic and professional credentials will help tilt the public’s opinion towards his. In reality, he’s just an old man unwilling to leave his own Land of Make-Believe.
