CBS News | Blogging As Typing, Not Journalism | November 8, 2004 15:30:22
Found this one posted up under Slashdot. And let me tell you, it's a doozy of a "we know better than you" piece, replete with the nose-in-the-air attitude and comparisons without backing things up with facts, but with plenty of implications.
Let me state this for the record: Blogs are journalists, but journalists haven't been journalists for a while either. There was, for a long time, a very grand tradition of journalism in the United States. For whatever reason -- and I suspect it's a wide variety of reasons -- journalists have abdicated this position. Taking a tone resplendant of a holy roller on Sunday won't remove the fact that bloggers are filling a vacuum in a time of need.
Let's take the case that the writer, one Eric Engberg, has used: exit polling information being posted.
A wonderful quote is this paragraph:
The bloggers, obtaining through leaks partial, in some cases suspect snippets of information from the early "cut" of data gathered by MSM through exit polls, were spreading a story that the network and wire service bosses knew to be incorrect because their own experts – and their journalistic experience -- had warned them of the weaknesses in such data.I'll point out two problems with this fallacy of logic: first, you expect them to act as journalists, when
Posted by Ted Stevko at November 8, 2004 05:26 PM | TrackBack