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Blogs in the machine by Ian Buruma 
Blogs in the machine By Ian Buruma Published: Financial Times.com, March 11 2005 15:58 | Last updated: March 11 2005 15:58 In a way, journalists have always had it easy. Unlike doctors or lawyers, they don't have to pass exams to practise their profession. There is no need to have attended a journalism school. All one requires is energy, curiosity and the facility to write readable copy on demand. Stylishness is a plus, perhaps, but less important than plausible analysis and factual accuracy. There are some national differences, to be sure. The British, on the whole, value stylishness more than the Americans, while the Americans try harder to be accurate. But in the old days, the public knew more or less where it stood. Journalists were, or ought to have been, professionals who tried to get it right. Their professional bona fides were tested by the institutions for which they worked, which could not afford to be associated with liars or crooks. The prestige of a successful journalist or columnist depended on the imprimatur of a reputable paper, and vice versa. As the FT columnist Jurek Martin put it recently, editors served as "gatekeepers" or "institutional filters". The public also knew more or less how these institutions - newspapers, TV or radio stations - worked. In liberal democratic societies, most were run as private commercial enterprises. The political views of media owners were well known, and these would be reflected in the tone of their outlets. None of this mattered, as long as there was a reasonable amount of trust that the truth was pursued. Journalists, in other words, were no less members of a professional class than lawyers or doctors. Some, of course, did turn out to be liars and crooks, as is true in all professions, but ideally the gatekeepers flushed them out. All this is beginning to change. First, the ownership of news media increasingly fell into the hands of huge entertainment enterprises. Then, because of new technology, factual news acquired almost unlimited sources, especially on the internet. Gradually the borders between news and entertainment, on television but also in the papers, became extremely fuzzy. As the film Broadcast News (1987, directed by James L. Brooks), lampooned so beautifully, a successful newscaster can be an ignoramus as long as he or she looks good and sounds plausible. The most important change is that the internet, with its millions of personal weblogs, or blogs, has privatised news and commentary, even as the mainstream media (MSM in blogspeak) have become corporate giants. The consequences of privatisation, not least to the MSM, have been dramatic. Being corporate, the MSM have tended towards caution and blandness. The smug assurance of being part of the establishment does not leave much room for mischief. Upsetting the applecarts of power is mostly left to the popular tabloids or satirical journals. If the mischief was too good to ignore, the MSM would stoop to dig into the dirt as well. But now that anyone can find an audience on the world wide web, bloggers have become the main creators of anti-establishment mischief. Most of the ranters, ravers and jesters on the internet can safely be ignored, but a few have emerged from the cacophony to reach not only hundreds of thousands of readers, but the establishment itself. Andrew Sullivan of Andrewsullivan.com told me recently how good it felt to know that everyone who counted in US politics logged on to his site. Although he has had no big scoops, and his advocacy of gay marriage lost him friends at the White House, he is still an influential voice who once received $80,000 from private donations to his site in a year. It is the scoops that put the blogosphere on the map. Trent Lott, the Republican former Senate majority leader, had to resign his post in 2002 because a blogger named Joshua Marshall, of Talkingpointsmemo.com, revealed the senator's long record of racism. Without Matt Drudge's DrudgeReport.com, Monica Lewinsky may never have become a household name. Now the bloggers have turned on the MSM establishment too. The veteran CBS anchorman Dan Rather, an almost god-like figure in MSM journalism, was brought down by PowerLine.com, among others, which showed that the documents supporting Rather's contention that George W. Bush had dodged his military duties were false. And last month, the CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan had to resign because bloggers pursued him for claiming that American soldiers in Iraq had targeted journalists. Sullivan, whose own fortunes have waned, believes that the influence of bloggers has peaked now that the novelty is wearing off. But others believe the blogosphere is not just pushing the MSM into publishing news they had not deemed fit before, but actually replacing the established media as drivers and voices of public opinion. If so, this would be a remarkable story of a bunch of misfits changing, for better or worse, the way we get the news and discuss politics. Sullivan, as a Sunday Times columnist and former editor of The New Republic, is also a successful MSM journalist. Others, like Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles.com, and Ana Marie Cox of Wonkette.com, also came from mainstream journalism. But one of the most influential bloggers, Markos Moulitsas of Dailykos.com, arrived out of nowhere. As Sullivan admits, bloggers often have neither the time nor the resources to do much investigation of their own. Like gossip columnists and satirical magazines, they rely on tip-offs, leaks and informed gossip. It is the speed and reach of internet communications that enables a lone operator with a laptop to act as a worldwide rumour mill. For the same reason, the internet can be a formidable fundraiser and mobiliser of people. The campaign of the Democrat Howard Dean was largely kept alive by his "netroots". Advised by star bloggers, including Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com, he managed to amass a campaign chest of $40m through the internet. James P. Rubin, John Kerry's foreign policy adviser, told a reporter for the New York Times Magazine that bloggers were "the first thing I read when I get up in the morning and the last thing I read at night". No wonder some members of the MSM are unhappy about the blogosphere, especially when it targets one of their own. Steve Lovelady, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal and current editor of the online edition of The Columbia Journalism Review, compared the bloggers - "salivating morons" in his words - with a "lynch mob". Reacting to the downfall of Dan Rather, CBS's Jonathan Klein said: "Bloggers have no checks and balances. [It's] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas." Andrew Sullivan sees such reactions as snobbery, an angry defence of privilege. Journalism, he wrote in a column, "is not a profession as such. It's a craft. The blogosphere is threatening to some professional journalists because it. demystifies the craft. It makes it seem easy because, in essence, it often is." There is something to this, but demystification comes with a price. Every institution relies on some mystique. It is good to be sceptical, but if conventional journalism, with all the checks and resources that traditional institutions have at their disposal, entirely loses the public's trust, there is nothing really to take its place; certainly not the millions of voices echoing through cyberspace. Defenders of the blogosphere don't see this as a problem, arguing that the sheer number of bloggers has a self-correcting effect. If one blogger gets something wrong, countless others will be happy to pounce on the mistake. It is, nonetheless, a disturbing prospect. You need Private Eye to balance The Times or The Guardian. What you don't want is nothing but Private Eye. Then there is the problem of money. The financing of MSM, whether privately owned or state-funded, is relatively transparent. We know who pays a New York Times reporter or a CBS anchorman. But now that the likes of Joshua Marshall can rake in money through internet-generated funds, that transparency has gone. It is safe to assume that at least some of these donations are politically motivated. One of the main persecutors of John Kerry was a blog called Talonnews.com, whose editor also happens to run GOPUSA, described as a "conservative news, information and design company, dedicated to promoting conservative ideals". The Washington correspondent for Talon was a man named Jeff Gannon, who made himself conspicuous during White House press conferences for deflecting difficult questions from other reporters by asking the softest of questions. Gannon was a welcome guest on such conservative MSM outlets as Fox News, and he "reported" on his website that John Kerry might be gay. It took another blogger, Dailykos.com, to expose Gannon as a homosexual "escort" named James Guckert, who had no journalistic credentials and advertised his services on websites such as Militarystud.com. He had been refused a press pass for Congress, but had no problem getting into the White House. A story of false credentials and murky finances, then, but also evidence of the self-correcting blogosphere. When Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, was asked about this case of mistaken identities, he sighed that "in this day and age, when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and choose who is a journalist." Disingenuous, no doubt, but it does show the perils of the free-for-all from which we now get our daily news. The star bloggers mentioned in this article have behaved entirely honourably. When Jerome Armstrong worked for Howard Dean, he stopped blogging, and Markos Moulitsas made no secret of his connection to the Dean campaign. But there is evidence that the disappearing borders between journalism, entertainment and public relations have corrupted the MSM, let alone the blogosphere. Consider the case of Karen Ryan, who was heard on television last year praising the US government's new Medicare Act. When she signed off saying: "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting." the implication was one of journalistic impartiality. In fact, Karen Ryan, "reporter", was the owner of a public relations firm or "communications consultants" paid by the departments of education and health and human services to promote a government programme. This is part of a larger corruption. According to the New York Times (March 15, 2004): "The government also prepared scripts that can be used by news anchors introducing what the administration describes as a made-for-television 'story package'." Then there was Armstrong Williams, who was paid $240,000 by the government to promote an education reform law known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on his nationally syndicated news show. Williams, who is black, urged other African-American journalists to do the same. Not only is Williams a conservative writer for such MSM as USA Today, but he also runs his own PR firm, Graham Williams Group. He said in his defence that he personally believed in the merits of the education bill, and was, in any case, "a pundit, not a journalist". Yet another conservative journalist, Maggie Gallagher, had to admit to being paid by the government to promote President Bush's programme to encourage marriage among poor people. She did this in her job as a syndicated columnist, while also drafting articles for the education and health department officials in charge of this initiative. Her excuse? That she is a "marriage expert" and that, when experts write columns, they need not disclose whom they work for. The defence, if that is what it is, of the education and health department, gets closer to the heart of the matter. Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families, was quoted in the New York Times as saying: "Thirty years ago, if you were a columnist, you were employed full-time by a newspaper most likely. With the explosion of media outfits today, there are a lot of people who wear a lot of hats. Where's the line? What if you have your own blog? Are you a journalist?" Journalism never was a sentimental profession. A good journalist, in whatever medium, must be sceptical, but never cynical. The current climate, created by technology and political manipulation, has become soaked in cynicism. When the government of a democratic nation fakes the news and discredits journalism as another form of PR, the public can only conclude that nobody is interested in the truth any more, or worse, that there is no such thing as truth, but only spin and opinion. This is the traditional view of tyrants, for whom all that counts is propaganda. |