Friday, July 23, 2004
Bartender, Two More
The news managers in the Bush Administration are clever SOBs, and the media tumbles for them every goddamn time. When the news should be dominated by the final report of the 9/11 commission--when the talking heads should be debating different levels of culpability for failings and what the potential remedies for these failings should be--the story is pushed off the lead by a supposed terrorist threat against media trailers at the Democratic Convention. We should have seen it coming. Because every reporter and producer will suddenly imagine himself being incinerated by a truck bomb or dosed with anthrax, leaving his/her beloved spouse and children to grow old and sad without him/her, this story will grow like a tumor, and voila! By tomorrow morning, the 9/11 commission's report will be as dead as Marlon Brando. Mission accomplished, again.
There's been a lot of talk in the last week or so about bloggers and the political conventions--and much of it, from the old media, centers on the idea that because bloggers intersperse opinion (and sometimes, jokes and vulgar invective) with what they write, Bloggers Are Not Journalists. Because they are not trained in the great gray canons of the sacred art of journalism, Bloggers Are Not Journalists. (I think maybe these people are jealous that Wonkette gets to talk about sex and they don't, but I could be wrong.) Well, first of all, some bloggers are, in fact, journalists, and good ones: Josh Marshall has been working the Valerie Plame case hard for a couple of months. Other working reporters, such as Robert Dreyfuss, have blogs, too. And the work of bloggers who are mostly commentators or analysts, such as Kos, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Juan Cole, and Tom Engelhardt, would do just fine on the printed page opposite the likes of Krugman and Dowd. (Cole and Alterman already have.)
But lots of us in the blogosphere don't pretend to be journalists. I don't. I have no training and almost no experience as a journalist. (Although I have engaged in the time-honored small-market radio tradition of calling the sheriff's office on Sunday morning for the Saturday night police blotter.) I've had people tell me, "Your blog is my main news source"--which scares the hell out of me because that's in no wise what I intend this blog to be. Do I look like Peter Jennings? (Let's see: Jennings--handsome, suave, rich, Canadian; me--oh, the hell with it.) This blog is the electronic equivalent of talking politics over a couple of beers, and should be taken as such. It'll require more than this bilge to make you informed enough to risk getting out of bed in the morning.
One thing I'll say about bloggers, though, be they journalists or tipplers: In the aggregate, we're a hell of a lot smarter and less likely to be snookered than the highly trained and ultra-professional reporters, producers, and executives at the cable news channels, who are getting played like a symphony orchestra this weekend--again. And they never seem to hear the music.
Ego Trippin': I find it can be worthwhile to periodically Google my byline just to see where my writing goes on its journey after I set it free. I did this today for the first time in a while, and apparently Katherine Yurica does it too--last February 15, I blogged about her article, "The Despoiling of America." (Find my entry by looking in the February Archives on the right side of this page.) She lifted my post, put it on her own website, and wrote about it on her own blog. Also, a blog called "The Last Minute" linked to my Democratic Underground piece about the death of Ronald Reagan. So I'm out there. Today I registered this site at Blogshares, which tracks and trades on the "value" of blogs based on the number of incoming and outgoing links. So if you have a blog or a website with a list of links, I'd appreciate it if you'd add this crappy site (jabartlett.blogspot.com) and my equally crappy other site (hitsjustkeeponcomin.blogspot.com) to your links list. (Be sure to tell me you did it by leaving a comment on this post. Anybody who links to me gets a link from me in return.) Then go to Blogshares and register yourself. If you're on the Web, people should have the chance to read you.
The news managers in the Bush Administration are clever SOBs, and the media tumbles for them every goddamn time. When the news should be dominated by the final report of the 9/11 commission--when the talking heads should be debating different levels of culpability for failings and what the potential remedies for these failings should be--the story is pushed off the lead by a supposed terrorist threat against media trailers at the Democratic Convention. We should have seen it coming. Because every reporter and producer will suddenly imagine himself being incinerated by a truck bomb or dosed with anthrax, leaving his/her beloved spouse and children to grow old and sad without him/her, this story will grow like a tumor, and voila! By tomorrow morning, the 9/11 commission's report will be as dead as Marlon Brando. Mission accomplished, again.
There's been a lot of talk in the last week or so about bloggers and the political conventions--and much of it, from the old media, centers on the idea that because bloggers intersperse opinion (and sometimes, jokes and vulgar invective) with what they write, Bloggers Are Not Journalists. Because they are not trained in the great gray canons of the sacred art of journalism, Bloggers Are Not Journalists. (I think maybe these people are jealous that Wonkette gets to talk about sex and they don't, but I could be wrong.) Well, first of all, some bloggers are, in fact, journalists, and good ones: Josh Marshall has been working the Valerie Plame case hard for a couple of months. Other working reporters, such as Robert Dreyfuss, have blogs, too. And the work of bloggers who are mostly commentators or analysts, such as Kos, Eric Alterman, Kevin Drum, Juan Cole, and Tom Engelhardt, would do just fine on the printed page opposite the likes of Krugman and Dowd. (Cole and Alterman already have.)
But lots of us in the blogosphere don't pretend to be journalists. I don't. I have no training and almost no experience as a journalist. (Although I have engaged in the time-honored small-market radio tradition of calling the sheriff's office on Sunday morning for the Saturday night police blotter.) I've had people tell me, "Your blog is my main news source"--which scares the hell out of me because that's in no wise what I intend this blog to be. Do I look like Peter Jennings? (Let's see: Jennings--handsome, suave, rich, Canadian; me--oh, the hell with it.) This blog is the electronic equivalent of talking politics over a couple of beers, and should be taken as such. It'll require more than this bilge to make you informed enough to risk getting out of bed in the morning.
One thing I'll say about bloggers, though, be they journalists or tipplers: In the aggregate, we're a hell of a lot smarter and less likely to be snookered than the highly trained and ultra-professional reporters, producers, and executives at the cable news channels, who are getting played like a symphony orchestra this weekend--again. And they never seem to hear the music.
Ego Trippin': I find it can be worthwhile to periodically Google my byline just to see where my writing goes on its journey after I set it free. I did this today for the first time in a while, and apparently Katherine Yurica does it too--last February 15, I blogged about her article, "The Despoiling of America." (Find my entry by looking in the February Archives on the right side of this page.) She lifted my post, put it on her own website, and wrote about it on her own blog. Also, a blog called "The Last Minute" linked to my Democratic Underground piece about the death of Ronald Reagan. So I'm out there. Today I registered this site at Blogshares, which tracks and trades on the "value" of blogs based on the number of incoming and outgoing links. So if you have a blog or a website with a list of links, I'd appreciate it if you'd add this crappy site (jabartlett.blogspot.com) and my equally crappy other site (hitsjustkeeponcomin.blogspot.com) to your links list. (Be sure to tell me you did it by leaving a comment on this post. Anybody who links to me gets a link from me in return.) Then go to Blogshares and register yourself. If you're on the Web, people should have the chance to read you.
