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.
July 15th, 2004 at 5:19 pm
It’s not the medium that’s important, it’s the journalism. There are good newspapers (LA Times, Washington Post), and there are bad newspapers (The Weekly World News, The Globe). The same can be said of weblogs.
Thankfully, there aren’t newspapers dedicated to the results of “Which 80’s Sitcom are you?” quizzes. If ever there was a compelling indictment of weblogs, it’s that.
July 15th, 2004 at 6:53 pm
Canada’s National Post is doing a good job at getting blogs - their editorial board blogs in realtime at http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/comment/blog/, and their print edition had a section publishing extracts from political blogs during the recent Canadian election.
July 15th, 2004 at 8:21 pm
Kris,
A lot of papers these days run pages and pages of inane polls, human-interest stories, and photos of kittens and babies. Seems not that far from a lot of the weblogs I’ve seen!
I tend to think the weblogs in question here aren’t the masses of angstful teenagers on LiveJournal and Xanga, though.
July 16th, 2004 at 5:24 pm
“…calls bloggers “pretend journalists” because “they thrive on rumor and innuendo…”
Oh that’s just some self-serving hand writing by a prof who wants more people to study “real” journalism in universities.
Most bloggers don’t claim that their blogs represent journalism. They are opinions. Surely a fancy university professor knows the difference between news journalism and opinion columns.
With a few exceptions, my essays aren’t journalism any more than Tom Friedman’s column. Neither of us claim that it is. The only difference is, as the person above suggested, the medium. Mine are done in a blog and Friedman’s in the NYT.