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.

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.

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. ]

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… No wonder Skube is so shrill: He is defending his income.

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!

This is not some generic populist argument that experts are per se bad, or that establishments are intrinsically corrupt. Rather, it is an argument about this specific community, this specific establishment, this specific pool of “experts,” and the proof of its harmfulness and complete lack of judgment is in the results it has produced, in the policies it has sanctioned.

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.

You do great, but we need more Amandas. Cloning is okay if you must!

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.

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.

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.

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.