Bloggers on the loose.
Jill has an amusing retort to this pearl-clutching “bloggers=dirty hippies” editorial by Michael Skube:
Take a deep breath and repeat after me: Bloggers do not want your job.
You seem to be under the impression that bloggers want to do away with the journalistic establishment, and that we want to replace it with an internet free-for-all. That may be what the right-wing, Fox-worshipping dingbats over at Instapundit or TownHall are fighting for, but for the most part, progressive bloggers don’t want to see the end of CNN or the New York Times or Newsweek. We just want you to do your job.….
She made this point during her panel at Yearly Kos, to much applause from the audience. For the most part, liberal bloggers love journalism; our complaint is that the media all too often functions as right wingers would like them to, which is to pass off White House propaganda and right wing organization press releases and Republican campaign rumor-mongering off as “news”, instead of doing your jobs. That’s what made this section of Skube’s article so fucking risible:
One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background — these would not seem to be a blogger’s trademarks.
To fit in with Skube’s pearl-clutching image of rowdy bloggers: Bite me.
Liberal bloggers are mad because of the lack of skepticism, a lack of restraint,
the lack of any sort of judgment whatsover (witness the breathless repetition of unsubstantiated slams against John Kerry’s service record), and an unwillingness to put oneself in the background. Nay, a complete willingness to suck up to people in power to get access. Is this the model of journalistic restraint and skepticism that bloggers are supposed to live up to?
The Bush press conference to me was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism, a final announcement that the press no longer performs anything akin to a real function. Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.
Abandoning the time-honored pretense of spontaneity, Bush chose the order of questioners not by scanning the room and picking out raised hands, but by looking down and reading from a predetermined list. Reporters, nonetheless, raised their hands in between questions–as though hoping to suddenly catch the president’s attention.
In other words, not only were reporters going out of their way to make sure their softballs were pre-approved, but they even went so far as to act on Bush’s behalf, raising their hands and jockeying in their seats in order to better give the appearance of a spontaneous news conference.
Even Bush couldn’t ignore the absurdity of it all. In a remarkable exchange that somehow managed to avoid being commented upon in news accounts the next day, Bush chided CNN political correspondent John King when the latter overacted his part, too enthusiastically waving his hand when it apparently was, according to the script, his turn anyway.
KING: “Mr. President.”
BUSH: “We’ll be there in a minute. King, John King. This is a scripted…”
The idea that liberal bloggers are too blinded by partisanship to touch the robes of the unbiased press is un-fucking-believably insulting to me, on a personal level. While the mainstream media brainlessly played puppet for Republican smear-masters, pretending that “Catholic leaders” were attacking Melissa McEwan and myself, liberal bloggers kept the truth alive, writing and petitioning endlessly for the reality that we were the victims of baseless attacks from conservative organizations that exist pretty much only to undermine Democrats.
I will say that this quote from the piece does get to the heart of the issue.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whose popular blog Daily Kos has been a force among antiwar activists, cautioned bloggers last week “to avoid the right-wing acronym MSM.” It implied, after all, that bloggers were on the fringe. To the contrary, he wrote, “we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we’re selling.”
As Jill notes, it seems that Skube and others in the “MSM” seem to view comments from bloggers like this as a direct attack on their jobs, as if we are storming the gate and want to take over. To a degree, this is true—one of the issues that was kicked around during Yearly Kos, for instance, is how to percolate up some bloggers to the next level and get our voices into the mainstream media, which is no more seedy than the efforts undertaken by those already there to get their jobs. (The LA Times regularly runs pieces by Ezra Klein, so it’s only fair to point out that they’re often on the side of the angels on this.) But when it comes to journalism, Jill is 100% right—on the whole, liberal bloggers don’t want to oust the media. We just want it to work like it’s supposed to. If the media had worked like it was supposed to, the nation would have known from the get-go what was obvious to those of us with a healthy dose of skepticism, that there were no damn WMDs in Iraq and the Bush administration was orchestrating a misinformation campaign to trick the nation into going to war. The blood of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is on the hands of every journalist who suspended good judgment and breathlessly passed on BushCo lies about the war.
That said, I do have a caveat to introduce that makes the whole thing distressing. Bloggers most definitely do not want your job. But I can see how it might seem, from the point of view of those who do have high perches in the “MSM”, that we’re trying to screw up their lives. It gets back to the whole acronym “MSM”—what Markos was probably getting at and Skube hysterically skipped over, was that the problem with the media is not that it’s mainstream so much as that it’s under the thrall of right wing elements, no doubt in part because it’s corporate-controlled.
One thing that became startlingly clear to me when I was the target of an ugly smear campaign was that laziness and outright mendacity are rewarded by the invisible hands controlling the media market. I’m guessing that Nedra Pickler makes a lot more money and has a generally better job situation for the hard work she puts in passing off right wing press releases as her own writing than some poor AP schlub who’s actually on the ground in Iraq doing the hard work of real reporting. A lot of people have risen to the top by being high on the lazy scale and low on the moral scale, and they have every reason to believe that if the rules were rewritten so that good journalism was the key to rising to the top, they’d lose their positions. So. It’s not entirely true that we bloggers aren’t gunning for their jobs. I’d throw a fucking party if Pickler got fired and her job was given to someone working on poverty wages right now doing investigative journalism, with the caveat being of course that said anonymous journalist was allowed to keep doing a good job.
Yes, those who carry water for lying, sleazy Republicans are scared and they should be. They have positions of power they don’t deserve and should be wearing paper hats and dishing out fries for a living until they grow a spine. That said, the general gist of Jill’s post was true—we’re not out to tear down journalism. On the contrary, we’re demanding that good journalism should be promoted.
22 Responses to “The Telltale WMDs”
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Ew, I don’t want them handling my food…
Yeah, don’t be dissing the fry-disher-outers. It’s a damned hard job that takes patience, timing, acting skills, stamina, and a certain level of hand-eye co-ordination.
Personally, I think America would be a better place if everyone worked six months dishing out fries. Maybe we’d be better people if we appreciated what it takes to do hard, boring work, all day, every day, day after day, for nothing even remotely approaching worthwhile money or recognition, let alone respect.
It gets back to the whole acronym “MSM”—what Markos was probably getting at and Skube hysterically skipped over, was that the problem with the media is not that it’s mainstream so much as that it’s under the thrall of right wing elements, no doubt in part because it’s corporate-controlled.
Right. I’ve heard the arguments to replace MSM with ‘Traditional Media,’ but given that the Trad. Media is all over the Internet, and that they even have blogs, I think it’s much more accurate to say the ‘Corporate Media.’ It helps call attention to the biases of CNN, the Times, &c., in a way that neither MSM or Trad Media does.
I second Karl Steel. “Corporate Media” is an appropriate term.
Amanda, you’re definitely on point. Unfortunately or fortunately, journalists are usually the ones that get in there, have been in the trenches, and investigate. We need people like that to inform the general populace (us). This is a great post, and ever since 2000, the rise of the blog came as a result of the lack of journalistic integrity. Come to think of it, the Fox News Network really started becoming popular around the same time, too. It just goes to show how important blogs are …
Great post, Amanda. I love your succinct response to Skube:
“To fit in with Skube’s pearl-clutching image of rowdy bloggers: Bite me.”
There seems to be at least two major things going on: (1) corproate control and the ideology/class preconceptions of reporters and (2) the incompetence of reporters. As Bush II said: “it’s hard work!”
You identify both well. I think you are exactly right abut Pickler: “passing off right wing press releases.”
Some businesses control the media even without owning them because they do the work for them and hand them a press release.
My succinct comment to Skube: fact checking, my ass.
I enjoyed meeting you at Ykos. You do great work. I lurk from time to time. I enjoy your writing and it is important for me to get a real feminist perspective. You do great, but we need more Amandas. Cloning is okay if you must!
Great post, Amanda. I love your succinct response to Skube:
“To fit in with Skube’s pearl-clutching image of rowdy bloggers: Bite me.”
There seems to be at least two major things going on: (1) corproate control and the ideology/class preconceptions of reporters and (2) the incompetence of reporters. As Bush II said: “it’s hard work!”
You identify both well. I think you are exactly right abut Pickler: “passing off right wing press releases.”
Some businesses control the media even without owning them because they do the work for them and hand them a press release.
My succinct comment to Skube: fact checking, my ass.
I enjoyed meeting you at Ykos. You do great work. I lurk from time to time. I enjoy your writing and it is important for me to get a real feminist perspective. You do great, but we need more Amandas. Cloning is okay if you must!
i’ve been calling them the “mmm” for “multi-millionaire media” for over a year now.
…the rise of the blog came as a result of the lack of journalistic integrity. Come to think of it, the Fox News Network really started becoming popular around the same time, too. It just goes to show how important blogs are …
POV journalism was very common before WWII. Post WWII, there was an attempt to “professionalize” it with faux-objectivity, etc. And mostly what we ended up with was the he said/ she said dance …as if a journalist is required to find the one person who thinks a McDonald’s Big Mac tastes like pate from Maxine’s. Or a network should give voice to the one asshated scientist who thinks global warming isn’t real.
During this time, we’ve had non-TV news organizations that resisted the faux-objectivity movement –underground newspapers, opinion journals, alt-weeklies, Hunter S. Thompson, Pacifica radio, etc. Then came the intertubes, which both exacerbated the rejection of “objectivity” and democratized publishing.
I think that many in the whatever-you-want-to-call-it media turned hard-right in …oh, about 1998. And I think it had everything to do with profit. They saw that Fox was gaining marketshare and instead of taking away the lesson that larger audiences were ready again for POV journalism, whatever-you-want-to-call-it media tried to get their Fox on.
There seems to be at least two major things going on
There are two others. The first is that the “MSM” (I prefer the old-fashioned “popular press”) has heard for so long, without any actual evidence, that it has a liberal bias that it has compensated by developing a distinct right-wing bias. Or at least, a willingness to listen to and promote messages from the right, in order not to appear biased.
The second is that the “MSM” can always get away with it because so much of the public is looking for short, simple answers and explanations, and short, simple answers and explanations that match their preconceptions, stereotypes, and other biases in particular. You make more money giving them that than giving them thoughtful reporting.
The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt.
That sounds to me like something coming from almost everyone who lives in a contemporary democracy –insofar as they are also anti-intellectual (meaning almost everybody!)
“The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt.”
You know, there IS some truth to this charge. Blogging, by its very nature, has no constraints. Everyone knows that there are indeed badly informed, curmudgeonly, and cocky blogs out there–some of them big box ones–that go hogwild with their freedom and publish some pretty invidious stuff. Corporate control of conventional media is disgusting. But it does no good to pretend that the blogging alternative is stainless. It has its own set of problems that it needs to work through.
Blogging isn’t threatening reporting. But then Skube isn’t a reporter, isn’t he?
He is a writer of opinion columns. And the old monopoly of opinion column writers is broken up by blogs.
Newcomers, some of them even doing it for free, barging in in a lucrative, established bussiness.
No wonder Skube is so shrill: He is defending his income.
Blogging isn’t threatening reporting. But then Skube isn’t a reporter, isn’t he?
He is a writer of opinion columns. And the old monopoly of opinion column writers is broken up by blogs.
Newcomers, some of them even doing it for free, barging in in a lucrative, established bussiness.
No wonder Skube is so shrill: He is defending his income.
I’ve long been a skeptic about the “standards” of “professional journalism,” and of course Op/Ed has always had open season on facts; at least that category made the open disclaimer it wasn’t held to the same selectively enforced “standards” as actual news reporting. But in fact the modern corporate media mainly sins by merely being less discreet about its selective framing of facts; all along, even those publications and programs that professed the very highest standards always skewed their presentations of facts to meet certain political and social agendas. It just used to be they relied more on selectively not presenting certain inconvenient stories, or downplaying them systematically, and that the unwritten rules generally followed certain broadly accepted conventions. Eg; don’t blow covert operations (like for instance the Bay of Pigs invasion preparations); put US foreign policy in the most lofty light; avoid covering the various crimes and misdemeanors of the corporate world. All this kind of thing could be justified by people who wanted to believe the free, competitive press was telling the essential stories by saying that of course, in the real world, the kinds of things they weren’t telling were necessary parts of doing business and therefore not “news,” since right-thinking (middle-class) people didn’t see any sensible alternative to business as usual, and why be “sensationalist” and fan the flames of class resentment? It all seemed reasonable if you didn’t look behind the curtain, or contemplate how the supposedly competitive, assuredly private, news organs had common interests both as news media (which wanted “access” to powerful movers and shakers within the corporate and governmental world) and as private corporations, whose stockholders wanted the same sorts of policies other corporate managers sought for their business interests. Since the invisible hand of the free market supposedly guaranteed that the collective interests of capital were in fact the best interests of everyone, it was all good, right?
So actually if we today think that news organs ought to have professional standards, we should take care they are more stringent than in the days before Nixon, or at best the improvement would be just a mitigation of the basic evils of consistently slanted reporting–what Abbie Hoffmann called “The National Party Line.” Or, the sort of completely free speech championed by the First Amendment doesn’t call for any such standards–free speech is rough-and-tumble, say whatever outrageous stuff you like and let your audience decide who they think makes the most useful sense.
These wanker punditocrats want the worst of all worlds of course–they want others to shut up for our alleged “irresponsibilty” precisely when their own fables and fabrications and myopic wishful thinking and foul bigotry are collapsing in flames and dust under the harsh light of reality.
I want Carl Kolchak back. Now THERE was a real “I’ll get to the bottom of these bloodsuckers” kind of reporter!
Hey, Tom, don’t forget about the Melissas! Both Amanda and Melissa should be going around the country, telling the cold hard facts about how Christofascism is destroying our country. Had it not been for Bigot Donohue, who also targeted Cosimo Cavallaro shortly thereafter, no one would have known who Amanda, Melissa, or Cosimo were.
Glenn Greenwald has a post today regarding his complaints against the “foreign policy community”, in which he makes some comments which sounds a lot like the comments about the media being made here:
This said, I absolutely agree that the term “MSM” should never be used. “MSM” is a right-wing term and using it only reinforces the frames of right-wing bloggers.We’re upset at the mainstream media not because we have something against the idea of “patient fact-finding journalism”, but because we feel the mainstream media isn’t actually doing its job of “patient fact-finding journalism”. We might have some ideas as to how the media should be different– less centralized, less corporate-beholden, more diverse, perhaps– but the problem at root is not necessarily the idea of a mainstream media itself but the thing that the mainstream media has become, the rut that the mainstream media has trapped itself in.
The people who own and promoted the “MSM” meme, on the other hand, the Malkins and Townhallers and such, are against at a fundamental level the idea of a mainstream media. They don’t want a media that represents the mainstream; they want a media which they and their ideology control. They are not angry at the media for failing to do its job, they’re angry at the media because there remain little bitty pockets which do continue to do its job; they’re upset that the the process by which facts have been replaced with talking points remains incomplete. These people exist, and we need to make it clear that we are not them.
This is something I’ve noticed as well. Pundits, the ones whose jobs are threatened by blogs, are falling over themselves to warn about blogs and how they’re somewhere between “not so hot” and “a threat to journalism”.
But the pundits seem to be the only ones. The actual journalists, from what I’ve seen, the people who actually get out there and do reporting, don’t seem to actually have any problem with blogs from what I’ve seen. It may be that this is just anecdotal or that my perception is skewed, but from what I’ve seen actual reporters seem to just view the emergence of blogs as not a threat, but just something else happening in society to report on. If anything, the “real” reporters seem to be going too far in buying into blog triumphalism!
Well..or maybe to figger out what makes
McClatchy tick in real time or E&P likewise
to do what real media…ought.
Certainly to count our blessing that either exists
if for no other reason than to know actual media
IS still out there.
[….and “under the thrall of …” or “in thrall to…”
Susanna Clarke would say. ]
I’ve ended up becoming friends / drinking buddies with several of the local journos where I live. For the most part, they’re bright, well educated, and well intentioned.
To start with, many of them are regular blog readers — that’s how we initially met each other (”hey, are you the guy who writes such-and-such blog?”). I’ve actually had reporters contact me about subjects I blog about (local politics mostly) looking for an inside scoop.
I like them. But there was an episode a while back that gave me some serious insight into journo-blogger relations, and forced me to rethink some things.
To make a long story short, there was a pretty egregious act of political corruption — the kind we usually only see every 20 or so years — that took place pretty much out in the open. It involved a guy with absolutely no qualifications but lots of political connections rigging the system so that he could walk off with a very important, very well paid, taxpayer funded job. Again, it all took place right in the open, and you’d have to be a major mouth-breathing retard not to smell the bullshit. It was a big deal.
Anyway, the paper pretty much ignored it. (I was reminded again of the difference between “coverage” and “journalism.”) And I’m convinced that was largely because the paper’s publisher sits on the board that voted to give the guy in question the job. She didn’t want the integrity of a board she sits on questioned in Her Own Paper.
Now, when I said that on my blog, well, they didn’t like it one bit. It was strange. They were cool with me making fun of movie and restaurant reviews they wrote, but when I dared to insinuate that that maybe somebody wasn’t doing his or her job, well…that was out of bounds.
A couple of them thought that because I have had a couple freelance pieces published in the same paper (a restaurant review, and I kid you not — a review of a Hank Williams Jr. concert), I was somehow being a hypocrite by criticizing the publisher.
Also, I got the feeling that they thought that blogging about it wasn’t an acceptable form of criticism. I think they might have felt better about if if I wrote polite, 100 word Letter to the Editor.
Like I said, it was an eye opener.
Now, a couple words in their defense — not every journo I know felt that way. A reporter I really respect called me to complement my “work.”
And a big thing I don’t think gets mentioned enough — these guys make shit money. They don’t live very well at all — I suspect student loans have a thing or 2 to do with this. When you have a master’s degree from a big, expensive school but make less money than a substitute teacher, well, a healthy dose of criticism from an area blogger could feel like piling on.
And as long as we’re talking about money, I think it’s worth suggesting that maybe the best & brightest aren’t attracted to the journalism field because of the low pay. Which is not to say that paying journos more would fix anything, I’m just describing what I see.
I’ve ended up becoming friends / drinking buddies with several of the local journos where I live. For the most part, they’re bright, well educated, and well intentioned.
To start with, many of them are regular blog readers — that’s how we initially met each other (”hey, are you the guy who writes such-and-such blog?”). I’ve actually had reporters contact me about subjects I blog about (local politics mostly) looking for an inside scoop.
I like them. But there was an episode a while back that gave me some serious insight into journo-blogger relations, and forced me to rethink some things.
To make a long story short, there was a pretty egregious act of political corruption — the kind we usually only see every 20 or so years — that took place pretty much out in the open. It involved a guy with absolutely no qualifications but lots of political connections rigging the system so that he could walk off with a very important, very well paid, taxpayer funded job. Again, it all took place right in the open, and you’d have to be a major mouth-breathing retard not to smell the bullshit. It was a big deal.
Anyway, the paper pretty much ignored it. (I was reminded again of the difference between “coverage” and “journalism.”) And I’m convinced that was largely because the paper’s publisher sits on the board that voted to give the guy in question the job. She didn’t want the integrity of a board she sits on questioned in Her Own Paper.
Now, when I said that on my blog, well, they didn’t like it one bit. It was strange. They were cool with me making fun of movie and restaurant reviews they wrote, but when I dared to insinuate that that maybe somebody wasn’t doing his or her job, well…that was out of bounds.
A couple of them thought that because I have had a couple freelance pieces published in the same paper (a restaurant review, and I kid you not — a review of a Hank Williams Jr. concert), I was somehow being a hypocrite by criticizing the publisher.
Also, I got the feeling that they thought that blogging about it wasn’t an acceptable form of criticism. I think they might have felt better about if if I wrote polite, 100 word Letter to the Editor.
Like I said, it was an eye opener.
Now, a couple words in their defense — not every journo I know felt that way. A reporter I really respect called me to complement my “work.”
And a big thing I don’t think gets mentioned enough — these guys make shit money. They don’t live very well at all — I suspect student loans have a thing or 2 to do with this. When you have a master’s degree from a big, expensive school but make less money than a substitute teacher, well, a healthy dose of criticism from an area blogger could feel like piling on.
And as long as we’re talking about money, I think it’s worth suggesting that maybe the best & brightest aren’t attracted to the journalism field because of the low pay. Which is not to say that paying journos more would fix anything, I’m just describing what I see.