We Have Seen the Enemy and It Is Us
Journalism and blogging. Blogging and mainstream media. The lines have never been blurrier. Or bloggier.
By Elizabeth Spiers – February 16, 2005
Elizabeth Spiers is the editor-in-chief of mediabistro.
If you've been reading the newspapers, surfing the Internet, or watching TV in the last week, you've probably seen a few bloggers waving the scalps of Eason Jordan and Jeff Gannon as proof of victory in a war where "mainstream media" is the enemy and the supposed artillery is aggressive fact-checking. What you may not have seen, and what you may not know, is that in a Hearst-owned office in midtown Manhattan, the editor-in-chief of a major mass-market magazine had done some fact-checking of his own—and his scalps were bloggers and other Internet commentators.
When Jim Meigs, the 48-year-old editor of Popular Mechanics, opened his New York Times on December 24, he noticed an advertisement for a book titled, Painful Questions. "According to a recent Zogby Poll," said the headline at the top of the ad, "66 percent of New Yorkers want the 9/11 Investigation re-opened. 49 percent believe U.S. leaders 'consciously failed to act.'" In smaller type, at the bottom: "Should the 9/11 Investigation be re-opened? Read this book and decide for yourself!" It was not the first time that he became aware that what he calls "alternative accounts" of 9/11 were gaining steam—The Big Lie was a bestseller in France, he notes—but it prompted him to do a little Internet research.
"I think it's important to ask questions and to push for accountability," says Meigs, "but some of these accounts went far beyond asking questions. They were jumping to some amazing conclusions." Of particular interest to Meigs were 9/11 theories that hinged on the structure of the building or the planes that hit the towers. "I thought, we're a magazine about engineering and science. This is our turf. Let's fact-check these assertions. So we hired a team of reporters and professional magazine fact-checkers. And what we found was every single one of them was wrong."
Meigs' fact-checking resulted in this week's cover story, "9-11 Lies: Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to Hard Facts." If you plug the link into Technorati, a website that tracks web referrals, you'll notice that the story has already gotten some attention in the blogosphere and from other websites. Instapundit, one of the more well-read blogs on the Internet, linked it favorably.
Popular Mechanics is institutionally more web-savvy than most mass-market mags. They had a website way back in 1995. So it naturally follows that Meigs has no prejudice against the Internet generally, and perhaps, by extension, doesn't believe that bloggers and mainstream media are necessarily antagonistic.
"I don't see this giant divide between blogs and mainstream journalism," says Meigs. "It's kind of survival of the fittest." Meigs believes that if bloggers conduct themselves in a way that their readers and critics know that they're going to be fair and acknowledge both sides of the argument, they have just as much credibility as mainstream media institutions.
He's not the only mainstream media person who thinks the blogosphere/mainstream media dichotomy is a false one. And it's especially easy to indict the concept when you're technically representative of both sides. Lockhart Steele, the former managing editor of Hamptons Cottages & Gardens who recently left to become managing editor of a blog network, Gawker Media, says he thinks of himself as more of a "media person" than a blogger, but took the Gawker job because "blogging is more fun." (Full disclosure: I was the founding editor of Gawker.com, Gawker media's flagship blog. I left for a mainstream media writing gig at New York magazine, and for what it's worth, also think of myself as "media person," but like Steele, am more frequently identified as "a blogger"—a moniker about which I am utterly ambivalent.) "You can speak your mind and write with fewer limitations," says Steele. "The upside is the sense of unintentional honesty that pervades the medium. The downside: typos."
Jeff Jarvis runs AdvanceNet (Condé Nast's Internet operations) and is the founder of Entertainment Weekly, but is perhaps more frequently identified as "a blogger"—or as he puts it, "blog boy"—thanks to Buzzmachine.com, his blog about politics, media, and whatever else strikes his fancy. Jarvis doesn't mind the moniker. "I feel an affinity to the blog world because it's more of a community than big media," he says. He also thinks his mainstream media background makes him a better blogger. "I can say, 'I know what you did; you sexed up the lede—because I've been there and done that."
So when Jeff Jarvis is fact-checking mainstream media (or "MSM" as bloggers call it, proving that even the blogosphere has not escaped traditional media's annoying habit of creating unnecessary acronyms for just about everything), are we talking about a blogger fact-checking MSM or MSM fact-checking itself? Probably the former, given that Jarvis is critiquing from the perspective of a news consumer. Semantics, really. And ultimately it may not matter, given that the roles are fluid and the arguments can often stand or fall on their own. "We have to get past this idea of there being two sides to this," says Jarvis. "It's not that. It's about citizens asking questions of power and wanting answers."
"We're all journalists," he adds, basing the definition of "journalist" more on the act of reporting than the possession of a press credential. For Jarvis, reporting is, by definition, journalism. He does, however, distinguish between reportage and the opinion commentary for which blogs are most well-known. "If you have an opinion and you have the chance to speak it, then that's punditry."
But if belief in the journalistic credibility of the blogosphere is a continuum, there are atheists to be had. A Monday editorial in the Wall Street Journal chastised CNN for "allowing itself to be stampeded by this Internet and talk-show crew." "No doubt this point of view will get us described as part of the 'mainstream media,'" the WSJ says. Whether the WSJ's perception that "mainstream media" is a derogatory label says more about the blogosphere or more about the WSJ remains to be seen.
The editorial was also a defense of the WSJ's decision not to give the Eason Jordan story major coverage. "The worst that can possibly be said about [Jordan's] performance is that he made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting," the editorial says. "This may have been dumb, but it wasn't a journalistic felony. It is for this reason that we were not inclined to write further about the episode after our first report. For this we have been accused of conspiring on Mr. Jordan's behalf."
Steele doesn't think Eason Jordan and Jeff Gannon are evidence that the blogosphere is conducting witch hunts against mainstream media people (MSMP?). "I think it's absurd to take one side, per se, over the other," says Steele. "Sometimes takedowns are warranted; sometimes they're not. That's not unique to blogging." He also dismisses the notion that the WSJ would have kept Jordan out of the spotlight out of some sense of loyalty to other mainstream media outlets. "I think it's just a matter of what's on your radar," he says. "I don't buy the idea that the MSM wanted to 'protect its own' in the Jordan case. C'mon, the media loves to eat its own alive!"
For Meigs, the credibility of the blogosphere (and Internet media, generally) is dependent on the journalistic standards of the bloggers. He refers to the legitimate blogs as "mainstream bloggers"—mainstream, in this case, being a superlative. "I think there's a massive difference between the mainstream blogger [and the extreme left or right wing sites]." Mainstream blogger, as in...? "Talking Points Memo or Instapundit—they exercise standards that are pretty solid." Talking Points Memo and Instapundit are generally considered ideologically left-of-center and right-of-center respectively, so the "mainstream" description is a little counterintuitive, but Meigs reads both Andrew Sullivan and Eric Alterman on a regular basis, so it's probably fair to say that he's not leaning heavily one way or the other.
Of course, that's not how the sites Popular Mechanics tried to debunk see it. The strongest reactions on the Internet to the Popular Mechanics article have come from sites that tend to be ideologically extreme. Meigs cites indymedia.org, something called the 9/11 Truth Movement, and some anti-Semitic right wing bloggers in particular. "It's been interesting to see the way the conspiracy theory corner of the blogosphere has responded," says Meigs. "There was a long detailed piece saying we'd commissioned a hit job on the 9/11 Truth Movement. There wasn't even two seconds of thought given to possibility that well, maybe we were right. Immediately the conclusion was that we're a CIA front! And that the entire program was to support the Bush administration or the Mossad or the Zionist movement and that our motives were to suppress the truth. They're either extreme left or extreme right—and you can't tell the difference! We're accused of being a CIA front organization," he laughs, incredulously. "And so is the Nation! David Corn at the Nation is also a 'crypto-CIA fascist'?!"
But is it surprising that the extremists would have views that are so...extreme? My own experiences with people who write for some of the websites Meigs mentions is that they firmly believe that the people they're targeting (the government, corporations, individuals, etc.) are lying to them, and if they put out bad information or information that may not be fact-checked, they're doing no worse. And in some cases, they're willing to put out bad information intentionally because they think they're being fed bad information, and publishing disinformation is fighting fire with fire. When that happens, the facts aren't terribly relevant, so isn't Meigs's quest a little Quixotic?
He doesn't think so. "That's what magazines set out to do. They stand up for hard facts." Meigs is concerned that bad information may get mistaken for credible reporting. "[The pieces PM addressed] look like journalism," says Meigs. "They read like journalism. They're filled with facts that look semi-legitimate. If you're a high-school student writing a paper, you're going to have to be very careful to get to legitimate information. I'm not saying we should ban it. But I think [checking the facts] is what journalism ought to do."
My instinct is that Meigs is right. But this is Internet media, so you—the reader—will have to judge our credibility on the issue for yourself. In the meantime, you can find more about the Popular Mechanics story elsewhere. You may even want to try their blog.
mediabistro.com inc., call (212) 929-2588 or email wecare@mediabistro.com |
