How Bloggers Are Held Accountable
by Chris Bowers, Mon Dec 18, 2006 at 03:05:41 PM EST
So,
Greater Boston posted a "Mea Culpa" to their erroneous (and hilarious) report on the erroneous (and infuriating) New York Times report on the mega bucks we bloggers are pulling down in this new, ultra-lucrative world of political blogging. Good. My parents were relieved to discover that I actually do exist.
For all of the mistakes Greater Boston did fess up to, there was a major theme in their original panel on blogging that they did not address. Namely, like many other established media sources before them, they failed to retract the utterly false notion that there is no accountability in the blogosphere. We have all heard that idea repeated over and over and over again, even though it has about as much basis in reality as the notion that Scott, Matt, Jonathan and I were all actually Jerome. It makes about as much sense that an institution as large as the blogosphere has quickly emerged and continued to function without any internal checks and balances as it does to assume that Jerome was able to produce the full-time blogging load of three people and moonlight for Senator Menendez in addition to his other consulting work for Forward Together PAC. Both premises posit bloggers as inhuman in our capabilities, and are clearly based in about the same amount of anthropological knowledge of the blogosphere as 16th and 17th century Europeans utilized in their most phantasmagoric and otherwise absurd reports on the native peoples of the Americas, Africa, and large parts of Asia.
Anyone who has ever spent any degree of time as a prominent blogger knows full well that there are a lengthy and strict series of accountability norms and mechanisms that political bloggers must obey, or else be ostracized and face irrelevance. Here are just a few of the ways in which bloggers are held accountable:
In short, there are many ways that the blogosphere is kept accountable, and all of them stem from our readers. Blogosphere regulars are
the most intense consumers of news, most politically active, and highest educated demographic of any news media audience in the country. This means that if we prominent, "professional" bloggers don't constantly have new, good content for our readers that is accurate, properly sourced, presented in an interactive format, written from an earnest, authentic point of view that comes with no caveats, and is something in which they are interested that they can't find anywhere else, we won't be prominent bloggers for much longer. And on top of it all, we are cleaning our own apartments, paying our own bills, doing our own laundry, shopping for our own groceries, writing our own html, serving as our own prses secretaries, and picking up side jobs in order to make ends meet as we run these small businesses without any advertising or promotional budget. And if we fail at these tasks, we face irrelevance. I wonder how many wealthy, prominent national pundits can attest to all, or even most, of the requirements on those lists.
There is overwhelming accountability in the blogosphere, and if anyone were to live the life of a full-time blogger for even one week then s/he would know that. It just isn't the same sort of accountability traditional journalists working in established news operations have to face. Quite frankly, I think the accountability we face is far more severe. For example, in additions to the reasons I listed above, I have edited and fact checked all 2,700 stories I have produced over the past two and a half years. When I make errors it doesn't take until the next day for someone to point out those errors. It takes about fifteen minutes--and you better believe that keeps me on my toes. In our contemporary era of subjective news punditry, I would like to see anyone who has ever decried the lack of accountability in the political blogosphere live up to these standards before s/he starts talking about the need for another blogger ethics panel or other ways in which we must be held accountable. After all, if there is one ideological point on which everyone in the progressive, political blogosphere agrees, it is the need for a much more transparent and accountable government. We expect no less from other forms of media, and we expect no less of ourselves. Nor should we, because if the progressive movement is not held accountable to itself, ultimately we will fail to achieve all of our goals when it comes transforming government.
Tags: blogosphere, media, meta (all tags)
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