IRA BASEN:
Bloggers vs. Big Media in Campaign 2004: Score One for the Little Guys
CBC News Viewpoint | Nov. 2, 2004 | More from Ira Basen
Ira Basen joined CBC Radio in 1984 and was senior producer at Sunday Morning and Quirks and Quarks. Among his other accomplishments include his involvement in the creation of three network programs The Inside Track (1985), This Morning (1997) and Workology (2001). He has also written for Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail and The Walrus. He has taught at the University of Toronto and Ryerson. He is a co-author of the Canadian edition of The Book of Lists.
Stop me if you've heard this one before.
"After this year, election campaign coverage will never be the same".
Depending on how long you've been around, you might have heard that sometime in the 1920s when radio first became a factor in American campaigns, or in the 1950s when television began to make its presence felt, or in the 1960s when advertisers began to "sell" the president, or in the 1980s when the spin doctors arrived with their photo ops and message events.
And you're hearing it again in 2004. But this time, the agents of change are not high-priced media experts or expensive new technologies. No, this time the revolution is being brought to us by a large and mostly disorganized group of men and women who spend much of their days and nights pounding away at their keyboards. They are the people who produce political web logs. Some are read only by friends and relatives, others have numbers and influence that rival those of older, more established magazines. And in this campaign, the "bloggers," as they call themselves, have been all the rage. And their presence really does seem destined to change the course of campaign reporting, just as much as the introduction of radio, TV and spin doctors did in the last century.
Future historians of political reporting will likely cite last summer's Democratic National Convention in Boston as a turning point. That's when 35 bloggers were invited to cover the event along with 15,000 other media representatives. The bloggers' presence in Boston was important, not because their reporting of the Convention was particularly original, which it wasn't, but because it gave official recognition to the idea that someone outside a mainstream media organization might have something to say that a significant number of people might be interested in reading. It affirmed, however temporarily, that "citizen journalists," as bloggers like to see themselves, can produce material that is at least as compelling as that provided by the "professional" cadre of journalists who have always held the monopoly on events like political conventions.
But the real turning point in this summer's campaign, the moment that revealed simultaneously both the shortcomings of Big Media, and the reason why the blogs are here to stay, was Dan Rather's unfortunate encounter with forged documents purporting to reveal information about George Bush's National Guard record. The significance of this event was not in CBS's use of forged documents. This has happened before and it will again as long as media organizations cut corners and rush to air without doing even the most rudimentary examination of their sources. The fact that the forgeries were first revealed in the blogosphere is something that bloggers are rightfully proud of, but that too is not the most significant part of this story.
The main damage to Dan Rather and CBS came not in its use of the forged documents, but in its prolonged and ultimately futile attempt to "stand by its story", long after serious doubts had surfaced about the validity of the documents. "Standing by our story" is one of Big Media's most treasured conventions. Anyone who has ever tried to get the press, particularly the broadcast media, to acknowledge it might have made a mistake, knows how powerful this impulse is to never admit you might have said or written something in error.
And were it not for the bloggers who immediately questioned the authenticity of the documents, CBS would probably still be "standing by its story" to this day. And in all likelihood, they would have gotten away with it. After a few days of stonewalling by the network, and a few desultory attempts by their Big Media colleagues to get to the "truth", everyone would have moved on to some new campaign outrage. The facts would have emerged one day, but it would no longer have mattered. As is so often the case in these things, it was not the crime but the cover-up that got CBS into the deepest trouble.
What Dan Rather and the other executives at CBS did not understand was how much the ground had shifted under their feet. Two decades of shrinking news budgets, lowered journalistic standards, and trying to pass off entertainment filler, commercial product placement and political spin as "news" had all taken their toll. They reaped what they had sown. The network of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite wanted to be treated with the respect it felt it deserved. But Cronkite and Murrow had long since left the building, and it is hard to imagine that their presence would be welcome in many of the Big Media newsrooms of today. David Broder, who worked with both those journalistic legends, lamented in a recent Washington Post column that, "the professional practices and code of responsibility in journalism have suffered a body blow. After almost half a century in this business, I certainly feel a sense of shame and embarrassment at our performance."
The blogs, on the other hand, deliver exactly what they promise. On the issue of "bias", the cardinal sin in the world of Big Media, the blogs plead guilty as charged. It's entirely possible that some of the people who actually work inside Big Media still consider their reporting to be "unbiased", but surveys consistently show that the audience simply doesn't believe it. Political blogs wear their bias on their sleeves. A good blog is a reflection of the bloggers' voice, attitude and passions. So is good journalism. It is just not supposed to admit it.
On the issue of correcting errors, the blogs also appear to be ahead of mainstream journalism. Unlike Big Media, which frequently sees every challenge as a frontal attack on its credibility that needs to be repelled at all costs, most bloggers welcome corrections from readers. Some people in the mainstream press see blogs as cesspools of rumours and innuendos. A columnist in the Minneapolis Star Tribune recently attacked blogs as "sleazy and unreliable, with no accountability. Most bloggers are not fit to carry a reporter's notebook." That is undeniably true in some cases, but where was the fact- checking at CBS or the New York Times, or several other high-profile media outlets hit by scandals in recent years? Bloggers offer no pretense to infalliability.
The point here is not that we will one day see web logs supplant the mainstream media as a source for campaign coverage. This will never happen, nor should we want it to.
There is a greater need than ever before for Big Media outlets to be at the top of their game when it comes to breaking important stories, dissecting spin, and highlighting the issues that matter to voters. But it has been a long time since Big Media has been at the top of its game. It has been riding on its reputation for too long.
The most important development to come out of the coverage of this campaign is that bloggers, and others such as the intrepid "reporters" at The Daily Show, have pulled back the curtain and revealed Big Media to be a shrunken skeleton of its former self.
Now is the time to begin rebuilding. And the mainstream would be wise to see the blogosphere not as an enemy, but as an ally in the process.
^TOP
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