Humility at last
...but will the humility last?
Glenn Reynolds - MSNBC
• January 14, 2005 | 10:23 AM ET
"Closely-watched media humbled," is the headline on a column in USA Today, where Philip Meyer writes:
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When Internet commentators known as bloggers started pointing out the anachronism in the typeface of the documents purporting to show George W. Bush dodging his duties in the Texas Air National Guard, they weren't telling CBS anything it hadn't been told before. Emily Will, a document specialist in Raleigh, N.C., was one of the people hired to vet the documents. She sent CBS an e-mail three days before the broadcast, pointing out the problem. The producers ignored it.
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What gives bloggers their power is not their access to information but their ability to put it on the public agenda. After the broadcast, when CBS posted the documents on the Internet to back up its story, the hue and cry of the bloggers could not be ignored.
Things aren't really getting worse, he says -- we've just started noticing how bad they are:
Some commentators have said CBS violated historic journalism standards by going public with unverified information. But before the Internet, the standard wasn't really that high. Journalists could get away with more because they weren't watched as closely.
One old-fashioned investigative technique was to publish unverified information in the hope that the resulting uproar would smoke out new sources that would provide the verification. That's exactly what The Miami Herald did in 1987, when it reported presidential hopeful Gary Hart's overnight liaison with Donna Rice. It had moral certainty that it was telling the truth, but not legal certainty. That came only after its story had been out for several days and other investigators came forward with pieces of the puzzle.
Yes, in retrospect, the things that we've learned about the media in the past couple of years have caused me to reassess any number of previous Big Stories, and wonder just how much truth they contained.
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And Jay Rosen, who chairs NYU's Journalism Department, isn't impressed with the way media bigfeet like Dan Rather have dissed the bloggers. Rosen writes:
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I kind of resent your attitude toward your numerous critics who operate their own self-published sites on the Web. They were being more accurate than you were, much of the time.
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Yes. Bloggers aren't perfect, but they don't have to be. Nobody does. But Big Media can no longer stand on their credentials; it's track record that matters, and the track record doesn't look that great.
Journalist Dan Gillmor says that CBS, and Big Media in general, should listen to its audience. I think that's good advice. I wonder how many of them will take it? |
