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Bloggers have more fun because they can have opinions and facts, but don’t get paid for it. At least, not yet. Oh, and they’re still shrill, especially when they’re right. That’s the shorthand version of Michael Massing’s article in the latest New York Review of Books. Glenn Greenwald critiques Massing’s Janus-headed view of blogs here and links to analyses of it here and here.
Glenn’s punch line is that the journalistic convention of balance, treating both sides as if they are legitimate and espousing correct facts, is false when it ignores that one side’s facts are false and their arguments are inconsistent, hypocritical and self-serving. That convention, which draws Greenwald’s primary ire, is like a criminal cover-up. (In come cases, presidential torture and illegal domestic spying, it’s exactly that.) It results in concealing the harmful or making it legitimate, and makes the reasonable seem radical.
I call that a victory for Karl Rove’s immunizing premise that,
"There are no "facts" [binding my clients], only opinions – and yours are wrong."
A true Through the Looking Glass experience, like living on the other side of the mirror looking out, not in. It’s disorienting in literature, and destructive when applied to public debate or public policy.
A feature of blogs like FDL and Digby that Massing and others continue to deride is that they are derivative of "original" reporting by MSM stars. By that standard, Massing’s piece was derivative in that he’s critiquing other people’s work. Naturally, he would claim he’s analyzed an existing database and made original commentary about its contents and organization. Thankfully he admits that reporters like Marcy Wheeler do the same. (Though he characterizes FDL as a "leftist blog collective". Pass the borscht, please.)
"The idea that our work is parasitical is farcical," Wheeler told me by phone. "There’s a lot of good, original work in the blogosphere. Half of all journalists look at the blogosphere when working on a story." At the same time, she said, "I’m happy to admit I’m still utterly reliant on journalists. You can’t have a conversation [about torture] without talking about Jane Mayer [of The New Yorker]," she said. Wheeler also praised Dana Priest and Joby Warrick of The Washington Post and James Risen and Douglas Jehl of The New York Times. "We ought to be talking about a symbiotic rather than a parasitical relationship," she told me. What disturbs bloggers, she added, are those journalists who reside in "the Village"—shorthand, she said,
for the compliant, unquestioning, conventional wisdom that comes out of Washington. It’s the world of the Peggy Noonans and David Broders, who are interested only in the horserace or in maintaining the status quo they’re part of.
Massing makes the tired comment that some blog reporters are highly skilled, but that their commentators are often wild and irresponsible. Ignore for a moment that the latter description applies to most of what Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Really? and Glenn Beck do, or for that matter, Ann Althouse and Michelle Malkin. Blog readers, more often trolls at highly read sites like Dan Froomkin’s or Glenn Greenwald’s, are not the worst offenders.
What Massing is missing, though, what he seems unknowingly to describe, is that blogs allow someone simultaneously, in effect, to read the New York Times Op-Ed page and to listen to subscribers comments about it. Imagine what you’d hear said at breakfast tables in Brooklyn Heights about Bill Kristol’s latest; or what train commuters from Connecticut think but don’t say as they rumble toward Manhattan, reading Paul Krugman’s comments about their banks and bonuses.
Unlike newspapers, Jim Lehrer or Brian Williams, blogs enable the sharing of comments about public events as well as news about the events themselves. And they allow us to critique those who used to control what was said, but not thought, about them. I think that’s a good thing and it’s why the MSM hates it. No one gives up a monopoly or any other power without a fight. Welcome, Mr. Massing, to this side of the Looking Glass.
8 Comments
This is because the Dead Wood Corporatists have failed. They pretend to be journalists while they promote the neo-conservative’s Shock Doctrine of Crapitalism.. Of course, I will give them as much sympathy as they give other people who jobs are eliminated because of globalism-none.
One of the worst is that lying sack of crap, Bob Woodward. He helped spread the lies about Iraq and Nuclear Weapons. He continues to protect his fellow neo-cons and their false narrative. He ignores the Niger Forgeries, the Plame outing, and the Libby conviction. He even seems to blame the CIA for the failure of the Bushies Irak War. How many Woodward lies can you count in the following sentence?
The MSM has no self-awareness. After round after round of staff cuts, it is increasingly reliant on wire services for its stories. These either are run as is or serve as the basis of articles by their staff writers (Much as happens in blogging).
Only a handful of news organizations had bureaus in Baghdad during the Iraq war and much of what came out of those was recycled DOD and White House propaganda.
In other cases as with government reports, reporters are given advance copies so they can write stories and have them ready to go once the news embargo is lifted.
The MSM certainly has far more access than bloggers. It still has considerably more resources to do investigative reporting. It just doesn’t do much anymore. Staff cuts and corporate resistance (don’t rock the boat) being the two primary culprits behind that.
Where bloggers and the MSM have equal access to materials and events, the best bloggers generally do a much better job than the best journalists.
What MSM types like Massing do is equate the best bloggers to the worst and then disclaim how blogging doesn’t measure up to “real” journalism. They seldom analyze the MSM using the same standards. A primary reason for the rise of the blogosphere is precisely how often the MSM mis-reported, slanted, under-reported, or did not cover stories at all. The MSM is going under because it isn’t giving people what they want how they want it. Bread and circuses, propaganda and infotainment, are a failing business model but not one the MSM or its corporate owners are willing to change.
Dana Priest and Ross Douthat of the MSM certainly aren’t in the same league. Ms. Priest is a reporter. Douthat, like Davids Brooks and Broder, is a blogger with a checkbook. Except that they do not have to defend their work to or respond to the immediate feedback from commentators.
If as Hugh says, Massing equates the best and worst bloggers in order to damn both with faint praise, how would Brian Williams, Cokie Roberts or Juan Williams fair compared to McClatchy’s war reporters or to Marcy Wheeler or vice versa?
I thought his article was pretty fair. The only criticism I have of it is that he doesn’t seize on the one inherent advantage bloggers have over the Village: we’re of modest means. This means we all don’t live in Georgetown. It means that Capital Gains taxes don’t really affect us. It means was can have our own sources, sources that the Village would never have. Our neighbors, fellow parishioners, etc, actually are auto workers, car dealers, doctors, nurses, patients, etc, etc, etc. It gives bloggers a better feel for what is happening on the ground–if we’re doing out jobs.
The Village, meanwhile, is left to visit the mythical “Applebee’s Salad Bar” in Des Moines once every 4 years, while enjoying the beltway cocktail party circuit the rest of the time.
The danger of the blogosphere is to cut yourself off to other ideas. Of course, we’re never going to believe health reform means the end of Medicare. But we should go listen to the people who are believing that, and trying to figure out why they believe it.
But overall, it was a fair piece.
Mr. Massing’s article was fair, coming from an MSM source. A good start. At the end, however, he retreated into his MSM shell.
Mr. Greenwald might be factually correct and legitimately disturbed at the serial crimes of the past administration and the MSM’s studied ignorance of them. But he’s passionate – implying irrational, when, in fact, he’s both passionate and extraordinarily rational. But to the MSM, he’s shrill and, therefore, not Serious or worth listening to. Those are rules for serving tea or conducting a bridge game, not for journalists covering the most partisan, ruthless politics in America.
The MSM’s faux balance requires it to put lies and see-through arguments and crimes on par with the truth and solid arguments and upholding the law. It requires demeaning those who don’t follow those rules as, “Not one of us.”
Mr. Massing’s entire piece was “fair” in that MSM way. Otherwise, I would say the first part was fair. He ended it, though, by attempting to rejoin the boyz in the gang, which required him to diss the good work he attempted to do. He did.
I’m glad to see this discussion taking place.
I have a specific reason for interest in this article: My older brother, an established academic with half a dozen books to his credit, and his wife– a lawyer who doesn’t practice– are dismissive of blogs. They read the Dead Tree edition of the NYT religiously, but spend little or no time with the blogs. I wanted something they would read that might help change their perception.
The New York Review of Books is usually a good read, and very reputable amongst the Devotees of Dead Tree literature. In fact, they sometimes give me a subscription to the NYRB as a Christmas present. So I lept at the chance to share Massing’s article with them. At least he gives Marcy a little pat on the back.
No response from my bro and his wife yet, tho’.
Bob in HI
There is a similar response to blogs by many academics and journalists. They consider themselves to be the professionals and that blogs don’t come up to their standards. They pick apart the weaker bloggers and then apply that criticism to the whole blogosphere. What they don’t seem to get is that what we are talking about now (and at a high level) is what they will be writing about and “discovering” months or even years from now.
I suspect academics regard blogs like historians once regarded television and films – convenient, enjoyable, but flawed, overly summarized and dramatized versions of history that don’t stand up to critical review. Not the stuff of serious research.
That description now fits most of what used to be regarded as news and it is blogs that fill the void created by that shift. That the WaPoop and often the NY Times is used to shill for a corporate or political purpose is irrefutable. But perhaps not to those who think the right and left of the political spectrum is captured by Jim Lehrer’s Brooks & Shields. (A description Europeans would find laughable.)