Ummm.... Houston.... We have a problem.
The blogosphere is under attack. Again.
David Shaw, media writer for the Los Angles Times, fired a direct shot at bloggers this week when he reported on a Santa Clara County judge's ruling against three bloggers accused of violating their nondisclosure agreements with Apple Computer.
Shaw jumps into the blog v. journalist fray by doing a smack-down on bloggers who are trying to protect themselves under the First Amendment by calling themselves journalists.
Shaw writes:
Are bloggers entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional print and broadcast journalists?
Given the explosive growth of the blogosphere, some judge is bound to rule on the question one day soon, and when he does, I hope he says the nation's estimated 8 million bloggers are not entitled to the same constitutional protection as traditional journalists — essentially newspaper, magazine, radio and television reporters and editors.
This statement will surely bring me an avalanche of angry e-mail from bloggers and their acolytes, cyber citizens convinced that I'm just a self-serving apologist for the soon-to-be-obsolete media that pay my salary.
David, David, David....it's okay to be a self-serving apologist. By the way, you did a great job on that 14-page-advertising-free piece explaining how your newspaper got caught up in that Staple Center profit sharing scheme a few years back. CJR has a good article on this.
Shaw argues that "BLOGGERS require no journalistic experience. All they need is computer access and the desire to blog."
I think many people that read the MSM might challenge Shaw's assertion. How much of mainstream journalism today traffics in rumor mongering, pack journalism, unattributed sourcing, and getting word from the "top" to produce what is labeled as news?
Shaw contends:
There are other, even important differences between bloggers and mainstream journalists, perhaps the most significant being that bloggers pride themselves on being part of an unmediated medium, giving their readers unfiltered information. And therein lies the problem.
Shaw suggests that the "unmediated medium" that makes up a good portion of the blogosphere as well as its flood of "unfiltered information" is an evil and dangerous thing.
Excuse me David, but I think your hubris is showing. You are assuming that people believe everything they read and everything they see in the MSM, or that somehow filters, otherwise known as human firewalls or newspaper editors, make the process safer.
Yes, I would agree.
Remember David, that it was a newspaper reader not an editor that discovered that a Los Angeles Times photographer had digitally manipulated a picture of refugees being guarded by a soldier in Iraq.
Journalists must deal with blogging by not feeling threatened by what they do. Journalists, like Shaw, seem to be afraid of bloggers because they do not want to see themselves through the same lens. It is sort of like the difference between high culture and low culture in art. Journalists see themselves as high art and bloggers as low art. Bloggers just see themselves, I think, as people who can take advantage of the Internet to get their message across without having to jump through hoops to do it. Journalists are not alone in their scrutiny of the blogosphere.
Some educators also fear blogging as well because having outside feedback circumvents the absolute authority created in the classroom -- an authority that propagates the myth of teacher as expert. As an educator and as a former journalist I blog because it connects me to a larger world-wide community of thinkers in whole new ways.
Although Shaw tries to make a convincing argument against bloggers by swinging for the cheap seats. I think Jack Shafer does a pretty good job summing this effort up when he writes:
Shaw seems to believe that the First Amendment and its subsidiary protections belong to the credentialed employees of the established corporate press and not to the great unwashed.