How Weblogs Keep the Media Honest
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 31, 2002; 8:41 AM
Bloggers are busting chops, big time.
The latest evidence: Some big media organizations are now quoting their criticism of other big media organizations.
It's called influencing the debate, in real time.
Web loggers, for those who have been vacationing on Mars, are one-person Internet blabbermouths who pop off to anyone is willing to listen. They often slam each other like pro wrestlers, but some of the best take on – sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly, often ideologically – the big newspapers and networks.
Some media critics dismiss bloggers as self-indulgent cranks. That's a mistake. They now provide a kind of instant feedback loop for media corporations that came of age in an era of one-way communications. Sometimes these are just policy arguments dressed up as media criticism, but that's okay.
They also call attention to good reporting, although that's not as much fun.
Many seem to be picking on the New York Times these days. That may be in part because it's the nation's biggest metropolitan daily and hugely influential. It may be in part because critics say the liberal former editorial page editor Howell Raines is pushing the paper to the left. And it may be that some detractors just resent the Times's power. (There was even a daily assault called SmarterTimes.com until the proprietor became managing editor of the New York Sun.)
U.S. News columnist John Leo taps into the blogging phenomenon, and in particular its anti-Times strain:
"When the New York Times ran a front-page report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan ('Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead'), bloggers descended on the article like ants on a picnic. . . .
"On his site, the Politburo, blogger Michael Moynihan noted that the Times's source for the toll of 812 dead was Marla Ruzicka, identified as a field worker in Afghanistan for Global Exchange, 'an American organization.' What the Times didn't say, Moynihan wrote, is that Global Exchange is a far-left group opposing globalization and the U.S. military. . . .
"The mighty Times may not have noticed that a lot of bloggers – some with small reputations, some with no reputations at all – now swarm over its news columns searching for errors and bias. The established media learned long ago how to marginalize critics and shrug off complaints of bias as the ravings of right-wing fanatics.
"But the bloggers aren't so easily dismissed. They don't bluster. They deal in specifics and they work quickly, while the stories they target are fresh. They link to sources, to one another's sites, and to the articles under attack, so readers can judge for themselves. The blogging revolution, says commentator Andrew Sullivan, the best-known blogger, 'undermines media tyrants.'
"On June 16, a startling front-page article in the Times reported that Alaska's mean temperature rose 7 degrees over the past 30 years. Sullivan checked with Alaska weather authorities and wrote that the Times figures were greatly exaggerated. The Times published a correction, stating that Alaska temperatures rose 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, not 7, over the past 30 years. But the Alaska Climate Research Center said the correction was incorrect. The Times correction of 5.4 degrees was still double the real temperature increase.
"Sullivan argued that the Times had 'cherry-picked' data for maximum effect, measuring the 30 years from 1966, one of the century's four coldest years, through 1995, one of the hottest. A report from the Center for Global Change said Alaskan temperatures did not rise consistently over the 20th century – the pattern was back and forth: warming until 1940, cooling until the 1960s, then warming again."
(Sullivan, as we noted awhile back, has blamed Raines for the paper's decision to drop him as a contributor without a word of public explanation.)
"Sullivan was also one of the bloggers who attacked the anti-Bush polling story run by the Times on July 18 under the headline 'Poll Finds Concerns That Bush Is Overly Influenced by Business.' That story seemed like an attempt to turn a poll favorable to the president into a vague vote of no confidence. . . .
"Jack Shafer of Slate joined the Times-bashing bloggers, complaining about a July 1 story, 'Bush Slashing Aid for EPA Cleanup at 33 Toxic Sites.' That story misrepresented a partisan squabble over whether cleanups of 'orphaned sites' (whose owners have gone bankrupt) should be financed by tax revenues or a revival of the Superfund tax, phased out in 1995. Shafer wrote that funding has remained steady in recent years and the Bushies want a modest increase for 2003, so the headline could have been, 'Bush Superfund Budget Grows Slightly.'"
Now Shafer's at it again, as we'll see later.
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