Bloggers are First-hand Reporters for the Invisible Primary
Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, in one of a series of dismissals of bloggers, summed up his opinion of their contribution to the information society by the following: "Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That's not bad. But it's not enough."
I disagree. Many bloggers are creating new content, hunting and gathering news and information, not just digesting it. The presidential race--or pre-race creates many examples. The invisible primary is a time of severely reduced press attention to presidential hopefuls. Even bigfoot frontrunners like, say, Hillary Clinton, do not get much national media attention speaking to the Women's Democratic Caucus in a rural county in Iowa. As Richard di Benedetto of USA Today once commented to me: "When I started in this business, I was taught that the job of a journalist was to go someplace that the public couldn't get to and report what he saw and heard."
But not many reporters are covering this fallow period for sensational news.
Bloggers, however, are there. When former North Carolina Senator and 2004 Vice-Presidential candidate John Edwards spoke at the University of Texas in late October 2005, blogger Neal Sinhababu, a UT-Austin student and editor of "Ethical Werewolf," recounted "the John Edwards experience." I quote him at length to admire an insightful and useful bit of political reporting, though of course not in the "objective" style of the msm press.
Over the last few years, I've developed an incapacity to properly listen to political speeches. I generally approach them in some kind of meta way, analyzing how the speaker's rhetorical moves and mannerisms contribute or detract from the effect he is trying to create, and considering how they play into a broader political context. It doesn't usually matter whether I support the speaker or not -- it happens as much with Democrats as with Republicans. That's not what happened today. For most of John Edwards' talk on poverty here on the UT campus, I was naively absorbed in what he said. This is partly because of my great Edwards enthusiasm, and partly because Edwards' speech -- the stated purpose of which was to encourage students to join a campus volunteer group -- didn't fit within a narrowly political context. It's also because Edwards is an truly amazing speaker. Everything seemed completely natural, off-the-cuff, and conversational and yet it fit together -- often uncannily -- into a well-organized speech. (There's a reason for this -- much of the speech is here. Ezra linked to it a long time ago, but I never got around to reading the whole thing.) The following reflections are, almost without exception, ex post facto.
Edwards' anecdotes about poverty didn't fit the "here's an example to obviously fit my point" rubric that disposes unsympathetic listeners to immediately think up counterarguments. In the aftermath of Katrina, Edwards met a man who had lived and worked for 23 years in New Orleans, but whose workplace had been destroyed by flooding and wouldn't reopen. A truck came by the shelter he was staying at to pick up day laborers for work at 5 AM some mornings. He had stood there for 10 days trying to be among those chosen for work, without success. He told Edwards, "So far, it hasn’t happened, but I want to go to work." The anecdote segued him from talking about Katrina to talking about general poverty issues, and I only realized later that it defused the stereotype of poor people as indolent and lazy. Some of the less tendentious Lakoff framing principles are operative here -- when you want your audience to think "A", and you know they have some degree of credence in "not-A", don't say "not not A". Give them evidence for "A", and give it in such a way that people won't even remember that "not-A" has some appeal to them. One of the major roadblocks to antipoverty spending -- the worry, primarily of middle-class whites, that they'll be supporting lazy blacks -- is thus neatly avoided. Does stable belief-change actually result? Perhaps not immediately. But I'm guessing that it would successfully push people towards liking policy proposals premised on "A", even if "not-A" also has some grip on them. And once people get in the habit of nodding along to "A", their attachment to "not-A" may fade away.
"Some of you might remember I'm the son of a mill worker" was successfully played for laughs, and that made me happy. Not only because it's good to see that Edwards knows what he's repeated ad nauseam, but because it's good (even in a fairly tuned-in crowd) to see that he's established his poor-boy upbringing enough that the joke works.
Edwards met with a number of other bloggers, including Phillip Martin of BurntOrangeReport and bloggers from PinkDome and InthePinkTexas. Martin then reprinted the text of the exchange, Edwards's speech in a post and a question he asked Edwards.
(Note how reaching out to bloggers is not just done in cyberspace!)
That is original content--for all of us to chew on.
david.d.perlmutter
in Blogs & Politicians, Blogstyle for Politicians, Political Roles Bloggers Play
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17 Comments
Reader Comments (17)
Bloggers are allowed to report on events and news that may otherwise be left out of the public sphere. But as Sinhababu realizes, these "reports" lack that objective quality that the press is supposed to strive for.
I'm not naive, and I realize that an "objective" press is an ideal that the American media rarely upholds, but one of the main differences is that bloggers are allowed to be "un-objective" and that is what their readers want. They want a voice that confirms what they already think they know to be true.
It makes sense that editors of newspapers like NYTimes would look down on this style of reporting, especially with the emergence of certain media outlets that appear to be seizing this style of one-sided coverage. If readers search out content that only confirms their beliefs, what use is an outlet that claims to present all the news objectively?
It is a scary thought not only for editors, but for all who believe in an objective media.
Blogs are authored by average people; UT-Austin student Neal Sinhababu is a perfect example. Other students are likely to relate to his experience. Even if he communicates an openly biased slant in support of Edwards, at least his opinion is clear and can therefore be considered when a reader gleans facts from his report of the Edwards experience.
Whereas some bloggers may be more informed than others, may have different writing styles, etc., what is unique to many bloggers is that they offer personal insight to events they may experience firsthand, and they aren’t influenced by an editor’s agenda.
As the blogger population increases, and people realize the potential web blogs offer to share information and become informed, journalists’ contempt for web blogs may increase as well.
It is also true that bloggers are not held to any level of accountability as are “real” reporters. Of course, this does not mean that bloggers do not hold themselves accountable anyway. I think it is commendable that a private citizen would go to the trouble of reporting on a story for the sake of making the information they deem important available to the public, knowing that they will not be paid for their efforts.
As I mentioned in my comment under “Are Blogs the New Iowa?”, I don’t believe that politicians are interested in acknowledging bloggers as yet another group deserving of attention. For that reason, it is interesting to read that John Edwards felt it necessary to speak to some bloggers. Perhaps blog tests really are the next logical step.
What is true, regardless of whether bloggers recycle the news or don’t, is that bloggers provide something the Times generally does not – opinion, context and analysis.
It may not be fair or balanced, but neither is the Times every day, nor is any other paper. One counter to this argument is that though objectivity may not be possible, it is worthwhile to chase after it and hope you get close enough to render a public service. And I’m not arguing this is a bad idea. What I would like to argue is that the public also can be served through a different kind of journalism in combination with traditional objective journalism.
The American public needs the New York Times. No other newsgathering agency – I’d argue not even the AP – reports the kind news as extensively and from so many places as the New York Times. But sometimes the facts about far away lands (even those as far away as Washington, D.C.) are meaningless to those going about their daily lives. Blogs can help with that by chewing on the news and helping make sense of it. Through its own opinion pages, the Times implicitly acknowledges that there is a place in American journalism for what bloggers do. Sure, there is a difference between bloggers and Times columnists, but this difference holds the potential to offer more depth to the information stream flowing through American public opinion.
Alongside Keller’s, “Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That’s not bad. But it’s not enough” I might add, “Mainstream newspapers report the facts from far and wide. That’s good. But it’s not good enough.”
While this particular Blog is speaks highly about John Edwards, it still demonstrates the fact that Bloggers are everywhere watching candidates’ every move. Therefore, the danger of making a misstep, that before never would have made news, may potentially be broadcast in seconds all across the web. Much of the Blog time candidates get may in fact be positive, but these positive posting are probably not what is going to make big news. Only when candidates blunder will what is posted on Blogs make big news.
I guess this is somewhat like what Schudson (1997) and Zaller (2003) were talking about when they advocated a monitorial model of citizenship and a burglar alarm model for the press. A few interested individuals paying close attention to every move politicians make and sound the alarms when the rest of the public needs to wake up and take action.
Maybe Bloggers are simply showing up for duty and performing a valuable service to our democracy.
But it is a new type of journalism. In fact, bloggers do not have to abide by the same professional standards as traditional journalists do –the standards of fairness, accuracy, and balance. Thus, many journalists look down on bloggers, calling them unskilled amateurs. Bill Keller, editor of the New York Times, is a good example to the above statement.
I disagree with Mr.Keller, however, that “bloggers recycle and chew on the news.” I believe that bloggers do not compete with the work of professional journalists, but rather complement them. It’s true that there are a lot of journalists, but they can not be everywhere at all times. Thus, bloggers step in and report on events that may otherwise be left without any public attention. In other words, there are people and events around us that are meaningful enough but professional journalists do not report on them for one reason or another. In these cases, authors of personal web-based journals become the only source of information to the world.
It is not shocking for a media organization like the New York Times, that many times fuels liberal support and opposition against the current administration in the White House, not to have a positive outlook on the future of blogging. This would conflict with some of their products that do not tell the entire story. You see, I did not say this publication prints false information, I just pointed out that many times it does not present both sides of the story equally. Bloggers could help set the record straight on situations like this and on any other media favoritism titled toward either liberals or conservatives.
Though probably unrealistic, maybe if only we could get more bloggers on the ground in Iraq, the American people as well as the rest of the world could finally see and understand the many successes and positive achievements being made there by the U.S. and Iraqi military instead of the constant spew of negative one-sided images and information.
The problem, as diversgirl points out though, is bloggers are not held to the same standards and accountability as professional journalists. Also, every blog out there is different. Many maintain high standards while others do not even understand the meaning. Like the individual journalists, all bloggers do not operate in the same manner and the public must judge each separately.
This makes you think, will bloggers help keep the “real” journalists in check if blogging continues to become more popular or will it expand the uncertainty of the truth. If this happens, the New York Times and those similar may get pushed to new levels of journalistic standards. So, there is no surprise that Mr. Keller does not maintain many positive comments on the subject of bloggers.
What the author of the John Edwards post did was in fact to some degree, journalism. The blogger recounted the event, the major points of Edwards’ speech and the relevance of his speech to the issues at hand. A journalist covering the same event would report those details. The difference being in the style of the report, the blogger having more freedom to assess the job Edwards was doing in delivering the speech.
Given the size and nature of the event, probably only a college newspaper would have covered it for a smaller audience. What the blog actually did was give a wider readership a glimpse of a politician aside from the theatrics of stumping for an election campaign.
The mention of agenda-setting theory is perfect, but you have to understand that the information is handed down from peers, who package it in their own way before spreading it to their masses. Also everytime it is passed to another group, it is again repackaged.
Finally Keller can't criticize blogging, when he is giving his opinion also. And no matter how much we want to push the issue, THE MEDIA IS HARDLY EVER OBJECTIVE. Every reporter has their own agenda. This should be common sense to any student who has been a reporter. Yes, ideally that's what all journalists want AND are supposed to do, but it gets old real quick and the reality sets in.