Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Wired Up
The ethics of blogging has become a major discussion topic over the last few days. Should bloggers be held to the same standards as journalists? Should they be held to some other consistent set of standards? There are two posts at Daily Kos that are worth reading, if this issue interests you: one by Kos himself, and one by a contributor, analyzing a review of Hugh Hewitt's book Blog. The review seems to suggest that because bloggers don't need to have "credentials" in order to reach a wide audience, they are somehow interfering with public discourse. This, of course, is wack. And not just wack, but an attitude that's at least 230 years out of date. The United States was founded on the idea that an engaged citizenry was smart enough to govern itself, and the conversation going on amongst bloggers and blog readers is part of that tradition. Do bloggers occasionally misrepresent or misinterpret issues? Of course, but so do citizens in a democracy. Would it be good if people weren't led astray by such misinformation? Well, yes, it would be great if we possessed perfect information all the time, but we don't. And there was never a time when we did--not even when people assumed that, for example, the New York Times and CBS News were impartial organs of truth, and that newspaper columnists possessed a degree of wisdom unavailable to their unwashed readers.
A more reasonable goal--instead of marginalizing the blogs to protect mainstream media's turf, which is what both posts view as the ultimate goal of the mainstreamers shouting about blog ethics--is greater literacy on the part of the public in regards to the public's business. It would help if people could differentiate between an analyst who knows what he or she is talking about versus one who does not--or if people could, at the very least, reliably tell truth from lies, especially when the information to do so is easily available. It seems to me that blogs are more likely to contribute to such literacy than from-the-mountaintop pronouncements of the mainstream media will. I shudder to think how stupid we'd be without the Internet and the blogosphere making it easier to know what's going on than it was in the days when the mainstreamers ruled. (Of course, "stupid" is a relative term. Even while wired up to the Internet and the blogosphere, the electorate still chose four more years of Bush.)
Those of us who know a little bit about the blogosphere know that the "ethics" charges against Kos and Jerome Armstrong are garbage--but we also know that we'll never hear the end of them. And we have a choice--we can keep trying to rebut them, but how well has that worked so far? XOverboard has another suggestion. Maybe the best defense, when wingnuts bring up garbage like this in the future--as well as other nuggets of arrant nonsense that we and they both know are garbage--is that we should suppress our natural tendency to rebut by reason, and just call them on it.
The ethics of blogging has become a major discussion topic over the last few days. Should bloggers be held to the same standards as journalists? Should they be held to some other consistent set of standards? There are two posts at Daily Kos that are worth reading, if this issue interests you: one by Kos himself, and one by a contributor, analyzing a review of Hugh Hewitt's book Blog. The review seems to suggest that because bloggers don't need to have "credentials" in order to reach a wide audience, they are somehow interfering with public discourse. This, of course, is wack. And not just wack, but an attitude that's at least 230 years out of date. The United States was founded on the idea that an engaged citizenry was smart enough to govern itself, and the conversation going on amongst bloggers and blog readers is part of that tradition. Do bloggers occasionally misrepresent or misinterpret issues? Of course, but so do citizens in a democracy. Would it be good if people weren't led astray by such misinformation? Well, yes, it would be great if we possessed perfect information all the time, but we don't. And there was never a time when we did--not even when people assumed that, for example, the New York Times and CBS News were impartial organs of truth, and that newspaper columnists possessed a degree of wisdom unavailable to their unwashed readers.
A more reasonable goal--instead of marginalizing the blogs to protect mainstream media's turf, which is what both posts view as the ultimate goal of the mainstreamers shouting about blog ethics--is greater literacy on the part of the public in regards to the public's business. It would help if people could differentiate between an analyst who knows what he or she is talking about versus one who does not--or if people could, at the very least, reliably tell truth from lies, especially when the information to do so is easily available. It seems to me that blogs are more likely to contribute to such literacy than from-the-mountaintop pronouncements of the mainstream media will. I shudder to think how stupid we'd be without the Internet and the blogosphere making it easier to know what's going on than it was in the days when the mainstreamers ruled. (Of course, "stupid" is a relative term. Even while wired up to the Internet and the blogosphere, the electorate still chose four more years of Bush.)
Those of us who know a little bit about the blogosphere know that the "ethics" charges against Kos and Jerome Armstrong are garbage--but we also know that we'll never hear the end of them. And we have a choice--we can keep trying to rebut them, but how well has that worked so far? XOverboard has another suggestion. Maybe the best defense, when wingnuts bring up garbage like this in the future--as well as other nuggets of arrant nonsense that we and they both know are garbage--is that we should suppress our natural tendency to rebut by reason, and just call them on it.
We've raised Ann Coulter to new heights by trying to counter her. She doesn't care. Michael Moore is delegitimized by the Right by means of sarcasm and humor. Dean was destroyed by jokes about the scream. If Crossfire opened every show with "and look what that crazy bitch said today," followed by a shot of Paul and James laughing their asses off, Ann Coulter would be the leggiest assistant corporate attorney in Accounts Recieving right now.We might as well laugh, because it might help. Not a bad mission statement for this blog, actually.
The right-wing bloggers don't want to hear our rebuttals. The President doesn't want to hear the Democrats' counter-proposals. History will never look back on this time and discuss how changes were made through the art of rational bipartisan discussion. But I'm damn sure history has a chance to look back on this era... and laugh.
