Media: More nonsense about the Intertubes from the PJS
Attention newspaper editors and reporters: When you are doing a story about political bloggers, it might — just might — be a good idea to pick up the phone and, you know, talk to a political blogger.
Sunday’s Journal Star includes an article about how technology is shaping politics. There’s even a segment on how blogs are making it harder for politicians to get away with saying goofy things. Because the article’s sources are pretty much limited to politicians and political scientists, the general tone of the piece is that bloggers are so darn unfair. And bloggers are biased. Well, openly biased, unlike newspapers with their unsigned editorials and pretense at objectivity.
I can name several people in public life right here in River City who do not trust the Journal Star because of inaccurate and misleading reporting on them, and then for continually repeating that inaccurate reporting when their name comes up in a different, unrelated story. And I’ve forgotten how many times the Journal Star editorial page has left out information that is contrary to the point it was trying to make.
It’s a tired old canard: The Internet can’t be trusted because it gets the facts wrong, but print can be trusted because it has editors. Folks, print has been getting it wrong all along. Which isn’t surprising, since human beings are involved. But so has the Internet. The media is plural. It’s a not a monolithic entity. But print and broadcast are closer to being the monolith, with all the mergers and takeovers. It’s easier, these days, to get a fair shake from the Blogosphere as a whole than from corporate media.
So can we please put to bed this stupid idea that biased and innacurate reporting started when Al Gore invented the Internet?
Big Media isn’t really concerned about whatever mistakes appear on blogs. It’s concerned that there’s someone to call them on THEIR mistakes and other assorted silliness. Like, maybe, NOT reporting that a candidate for congress wants to violate the nuclear anti-proliferation agreement.
And by the way, 100,000 “hits” a month is NOTHING. I got 902,000 hits in April. I suspect that the Illinois GOP site actually gets something like 100,000 page views, which is more respectable. But not close to the 345,403 page views that Webalizer says I got in April.
But then, if the writer of this piece had bothered to speak to a political blogger about the effect of political blogs on politics, this little mistake might not have happened.
