Harvard is hosting a conference on
Blogging, Journalism and Credibility:
Digby has some thoughts on the subject:
Check out the
panel of experts. At least four or five of them even have blogs of their very own!
It's good to see that they did invite at least one non-media or academic blogger -- Hinderocket. (We on the left are well represented by the corporate media and liberal academia, of course, so we needn't have any similarly popular grassroots partisan bloggers on the panels.)
They seem extremely concerned about the bloggers inconscionable lack of ethics so I'm hoping they can find some ways to correct our egregious practices.
While it is obviously preposterous that a conference about ethics and blogging includes almost no one who is primarily a blogger rather than a journalist, the frequency with which political blogs are held to the same standards as an almost entirely different activity--journalism--is just as preposterous. Blogging is not journalism, and vice versa, but journalists, both in print and on television,
frequently view blogging as some sort of slight variation on journalism that should thus be held to the same standards as journalists.
Jay Rosen writes of this absurdity:
Journalism ethics has suffered for a very long time from complacency and self-satisfaction. I believe journalism education (my profession, and Poynter's mission too) is hugely responsible for that, with lots of help from newsroom people. For an example of what I mean, I give you an incident from February of 2004, during the primaries,
chronicled at PressThink: Campaign Desk's unbelievably condescending attitude toward bloggers when some of them published exit poll data. Instead of arguing the merits of one ethic (the public should have access to the same data as the pros) vs. another (exit poll voting can affect the vote), the "traditionalists" at the Desk used ethics as a mallet to whack bloggers over the head and take up a position as the real journalists. This is all too common. Being ethical is of the greatest importance in journalism. "Journalism ethics" as it has evolved is too often about validating the worldview of mainstream journalism as the one view that has moral force.
How to get beyond this? My answer would be to shift the starting point of the discussion from ethics, an epiphenomenon, to trust, a much deeper, more interesting and more complicated question. Trust in journalism can be produced in different ways. In the age of Benjamin Franklin people may have trusted the newspaper because they knew the proprietor as an upstanding citizen. When newspapers were produced for merchants and traders, trust had a lot to do with membership in a common class. With the party press, trust in the party and its principles was transferred to the newspaper. In the twentieth century when news became a business aiming for the largest market possible, and journalism tried to become a profession, "ethics" was born as the way to manufacture trust. Over time ethics became rules and rituals. Adherence to the rules, performance of the rituals, was supposed to produce trust.
Today it can no longer be assumed that following the rules, and performing the rituals will lead to trust. Nor can it be assumed that other information providers (like bloggers) who do not follow the same rules or enact the same rituals will be mistrusted.
Not only do I think Rosen is correct, I think he could go even further. Of course is makes no sense to apply the same rules of "trust" in one type of information provider to a different type of provider, but the difference between political blogging and journalism as greater than just being different types of information providers.
In my original thesis on the subject, posted last May, I wrote a preliminary definition of this difference that I have still yet to significantly improve upon:
The Blogosphere is a counter-institutional formation that seeks to relocate the primary purpose of political and opinion journalism in agitation toward action rather than in profit-based consumption.
Blogs are not merely filling a subjective market for slanted news, ala Fox. Instead, the function of our writing is frequently directed toward political activity and organizing If this is interpreted as "bias," then the person doing the exegesis is missing the point. Blogging is a different activity from journalism not just because it provides a different type of information entirely online, but because it does so for a different purpose. Political blogging has become, in many ways, a form of political organizing. Thus, any discussion of "blog ethics" or "blog accountability" cannot be done exclusively within a journalistic frame. Instead, "blog ethics" and "blog accountability" is equally, if not more, similar to "organizing ethics" and activist accountability." Considering this, Rosen reframes the entire discussion in a far more productive manner:
My suggestion then is to throw out ethics as the starting point, and begin with a different question: how is social trust created online, and maintained interactively?
Political blogging is a community activity. If bloggers lose the social trust they have built up with their readers, commenters and fellow bloggers, then they will cease to be relevant as their audience and colleagues go somewhere else. This is very much the same for any organizer or activist. Unless more people recognize this, much of the contemporary discourse about blogs will remain impoverished and dominated by an inappropriate journalistic framework.
