The MSM just doesn't get it.
CNN - AMERICAN MORNING
Storm's Aftermath; Blog Nation; 'Paging Dr. Gupta'
Aired January 24, 2005 - 8:29 ET
..... Hugh Hewitt joins us this morning.
Nice to see you. Who -- the blogs run the gamut from political to general social commentary, to personal stories. It's shortened for web log, hence blog. Who is reading the blogs?
HUGH HEWITT, AUTHOR, "BLOG": Everyone. And depending on the sector that they're in, they segment down. Two weeks ago, the vice chairman of General Motors started a blog so he could talk to the design community and car enthusiasts. Last week, the vice president of Boeing for marketing started a blog, "Randy's Place," so he could talk to the airline industry.
O'BRIEN: But they really started the sort of personal diaries. When you hear that General Motors, the head guy, is staring a blog, I mean, don't you get the sense that that's much more maybe a commercial venture?
HEWITT: No, I don't. Actually, it's because there's seven million blogs. They're all over the lot. But what they want is direct participation without intermediaries with their customers and with their enthusiasts.
They don't want to go through you anymore. They want to talk directly to the people who -- who may be blocking the future for them in the car design world.
And the political bloggers have been there for four years. We were the first ones to get there. But now business is rushing.
Front page of "The New York Times" today is about the lack of advertising space on the Internet because they're coming back. The dot-com bust is over, evidently. Blogs are going to make that happen as well.
O'BRIEN: Do people read blogs because they don't want to hear from the mainstream media, or because they want more information, or because they don't trust the mainstream media?
HEWITT: Bloggers are cyber sherpas. We're guides. There's so much information today. Everything is available, everything is free. And we pick and choose.
When you go to a "Talking Points Memo" on the left, he'll tell Democrats and lefties what they should be reading. When you come to hughhewitt.com or Powerline, we'll line things up. If you want to know what's going on in Baghdad today, Mabil Gazette (ph) is there. He's a soldier blogging from Baghdad. If you want to know about the war on terror, you read The Belmont Club. And there's theology blogs, there's business blogs.
We are actually translating too much information into manageable amounts of units. And it's going -- it has already changed business.
O'BRIEN: It's manageable, but is it accurate? Because, at the end of the day, it's someone's personal diary. And who knows who the person is necessarily who's actually blogging, right?
HEWITT: Well, I've been a broadcast journalists for 15 years. I've worked in print and television and radio. And the blogosphere is by far the most accurate and the most objective in terms of accountability. Because the moment you make a mistake, you get jumped on by your colleagues and your adversaries in the blogosphere. Dan Rather got brought down by bloggers.
O'BRIEN: I was going to ask you about that.
HEWITT: Yes. Powerline found it. A number of us jumped on to the story, (UNINTELLIGIBLE) and others.
O'BRIEN: Outside of that glaring example that we all know about, where else do you think that blogs have played an important role in keeping the media honest?
HEWITT: Oh, Trent Lott is no longer the majority leader of the Senate because blogs picked up a story -- Joshua Micahl Marshall did and the people at the corner at "National Review," that the mainstream media had not seen, his remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday party.
Howell Raines is no longer the editor at "The New York Times" largely because Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus, a blogger in New York and one on the West Coast, helped drive the story in Romenesko, which is kind of a neo-blog over at Pointer Institute (ph).
And then the most recent one this summer, John Kerry did not answer when the bloggers lifted the Swift Boat Vets up and proved that he had made up that stuff about being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve in 1968. Over and over again.
Just this weekend, Tim Blair, an Australian blogger, a very good blogger, took a "Washington Post" piece that was completely silly -- and the term is "fisk" -- destroyed it, deconstructed it, proved that it was all spin. When Barbara Boxer made her inane comments last week at the Condoleezza Rice hearings, bloggers posted them, dissected them before the news had even put it on the air.
So we're much faster, we're much more reliable, we're much more accurate.
O'BRIEN: Hugh Hewitt, your blog is hughhewitt.com.
HEWITT: That's right. O'BRIEN: Nice to talk to you. Thanks very much. |
