Media

By now, everyone who is interested has heard the tale of CNN news chief Eason Jordan. Jordan makes wild and unsubstantiated claims, big media ignore the story, and the blogs won’t shut up about it. Eventually Eason resigns in disgrace.

Bloggers like to say that they’ll replace MSM some day. Not gonna happen. We don’t have the resources to gather data, interview people, and get the stories out in a coherent way.

But Eason and Ra^thergate has shown what we’re good for. Keeping them honest, shining a thousand tiny lights at outrageously biased behavior and unsubstantiated claims until everyone notices.

So it’s important that we realize that we’re like a swarm of unpaid editors and ombudsmen, not the reporters who know how to get the goods. Unless we happen to be very lucky we’re not going to break the big story. Instead we’re going to make sure that uncomfortable truths aren’t buried in favor of some agenda.

Big media claim that we’re getting in the way. They say that we’re just a bunch of partisan hacks who wouldn’t know good journalism if it came up and bit us on the nose. The unrelenting harping of the blogs, they say, is making it harder for them to do their jobs.

Well, we might make it harder for MSM to do their job, but we’re also forcing them to do it right.

UPDATE
Ginny, one of my fellow Chicago Boyz, makes a wonderful observation in the comments below, comparing bloggers to old-style ham radio operators. She even manages to work in a reference to Libertarians. Well worth your time.

Law enforcement professionals have a wall that seperates them from their fellow man. A sucessful investigation of a crime is one that results in the arrest and conviction of the guilty.

So that means that the only thing that matters is evidence. Stuff that will convince the judge or jury that this guy did this crime beyond a reasonable doubt. The detectives can speculate all they want, but if they don’t have something to back it up then they leave it outside the door when they walk into a courtroom. If they don’t then they’ll probably lose the case and their credibility will be questioned the next time they come in front of the judge. What’s worse is that the perp will walk and go on to commit more crimes.

Of course, it’s an imperfect world. Sometimes a whole case is built on speculation, and sometimes someone is convicted when they shouldn’t be. We rightly see this as a miscarriage of justice, an instance when our society violates the very principles which make up its foundation. It’s where we all agree that the system breaks down.

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So JibJab has a new flash movie up, poking fun at President Bush’ recent win and the Democrat’s disappointment with same.

Fair enough, but CNN’s Headline News is showing the movie in it’s entirety. They show it right before cutting to commercial, and then they lede with a report about violence in Iraq.

But that’s not really significant because they have a story every 15 minutes about Iraq, all of them negative. (I’m still waiting for them to air a positive report about the situation in Iraq. They might have in the past, but if so then it was so fleeting that I’ve never seen one.) I suppose the big question is why they wasted time with the JibJab movie when they could have devoted the time to yet more items that painted our efforts in a negative light.

No liberal bias to see here. Move along.

I’ve talked here before about news items that talk about incredibly obvious subjects. Here’s another example. The headline reads ….

STUDY: ELDERLY GAMBLERS MAY BET TOO HIGH

The author points out that retirees on fixed incomes don’t have a, you know, income, in order to take care of debts. If they start to gamble away their nest egg they could be in real trouble.

I’m glad they cleared that up for me. Had no idea.

I think this is proof that journalists might not be stupid, they just operate under the assumption that we are. That’s why they so often come off sounding stupid themselves as they try and cater to the imagined intelligence of their customers.

I first started reading the blogs because they were fast. Bloggers would usually post about an upcoming newsworthy subject, discuss every single ramification while fact checking to death, and then go on to something else. Then, two days or so after the blogs had moved on, I’d see the headlines on the front page of my local newspaper.

It’s this desire to find out what’s going on that drives many people to the blogs. Once they get here they soon find that the story they’re reading in the mainstream press isn’t really what’s going on. It’s spun, distorted, altered to conform to the preconceptions and prejudices of the author and his editors.

A dear friend of mine sent me a link to this article in the UK Independent, a British newspaper. The author is Rageh Omaar, whose day job is working for the BBC. He talks about how people in the United States are turning in ever greater numbers to blogs and the Internet to get their news. He gets it right when he says that people have lost faith in the traditional news organizations and are trying to find less biased sources.

What’s I found interesting is that he actually thought that American Big Media was too conservative! He closes his article by quoting Rick Mercier, a columnist for The Free Lance-Star in Virginia. Mr. Mercier is extremely critical of the Bush administration, and sees the invasion of Iraq as a failure of the press to do their job.

Well, you can find always find an op-ed somewhere that will support your confirm your own prejudices. What Mr. Omaar needs to do is take a look at the studies that prove that the American media is hopelessly slanted to the Left, and we’ve had proof of that since at least 1980.

Of course, we are talking about a guy who works for the BBC. The only thing I can say is that he’d better take the time for a little introspection and recognize his own bias while he has a chance. After all, a group of bloggers are nipping at the BBC’s heels even as we speak.