From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun 08 Jun 2003 - 21:39:12 GMT
Truth serum
by David Warren
"We get results," is a characteristic boast in James Taranto's
daily blog, Best of the Web Today. (It is one of the Wall Street
Journal's free online features.) The cry goes up each time
someone he has exposed for shoddy or vicious journalistic
practices is compelled to make amends. Last Sunday I wrote
about the Jayson Blair debacle at the New York Times, and
what it portends for print journalism at large. On Thursday,
the Times's top two editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd,
resigned in half-acknowledged disgrace. With his newsroom
melting down, the publisher brought the previous editor out of
retirement, to begin a clean-up. Desperate measures will be
required to salvage the paper's reputation.
Now, my reader will guess it was not my Sunday Spectator
that pulled Mr. Raines down. (I can only dream of such
power!) It was instead the relentless exposure of internal facts
about the "grey lady" -- chiefly by a cast of Internet bloggers,
working without direction, management, or deadlines, and
without pay except through "tipping jars" directly from their
readers. They got results, which could never have been
achieved had the Times's management been able to circle its
wagons in the old way.
To many of my readers, a "blog" will be a mysterious thing. I
would no more wish to describe how one works than to tell you
in prose how to assemble an aeroplane; the best thing is to
connect to the Internet and enter one. Let me suggest, for
starters, a tour of the Koh-i-Noor of blogs, Glenn Reynolds' s
InstaPundit, at: http://64.247.33.250/. Let your fingers walk:
scroll down, scroll up, read around, try some of the links,
check some of the readers' comments, and within an hour
you'll be at home in it. Or if you get lost, just ask any kid to
help you. From there you may link to many other locations in
the "blogosphere" -- and you will begin to understand the
concept.
A revolution is happening in journalism, right now; a
revolution with huge political implications. Blogs are the
cause. And the fall of Howell Raines this last week is like the
first brick in a Berlin Wall. It will not stop tumbling.
Though made of words, a blog is a different thing, in kind,
from printed articles in a newspaper or magazine, in which
sources of information may be stated but must be taken by the
reader on faith, unless the reader has the time, ability, and
personal connexions to retrace them. And if he does, what he
finds must then be taken on faith by his readers.
The blog may be updated by the minute or the hour, it remains
accessible and searchable through its archives, but most
crucially, it contains those Internet links. Through them, the
bloggers are universally networked. They link each other's
precise words, and -- comes the revolution -- are able to
reference most of their sources almost instantaneously, in the
original form.
The almost infinitely extendable electronic field of text, allows
whatever space is necessary to delve into fine details. The
"comments" that readers can append to each blog "post"
provide a court of cross-examination, so the blogger himself is
quickly exposed in any sharp practice. The bloggers also act as
checks on one another, and cross-link when they contest each
other's views and findings.
Example, bloggers have recently demolished one malicious
misquotation after another of Bush administration officials, by
leftwing newspaper reporters and columnists, simply by
juxtaposing through links what the journalist tried to get away
with, to the original transcripts.
In another breakthrough on Thursday, the Guardian, a British
leftwing daily, found itself retracting two of its biggest recent
stories. In the first it alleged Colin Powell and Jack Straw had
had doubts about the evidence they gave before the war of
Iraqi WMD, citing a meeting between them that -- had never
taken place. In the second, it said Paul Wolfowitz had admitted
the U.S. went into Iraq for its oil, quoting -- wilfully and
dishonestly from a text retranslated through German.
Bloggers had been all over both stories, and made the
difference on the second.
Through a variety of methods of pooling and focusing the
immense resources of the Internet and its readers, a series of
other propagandist try-ons have been demolished recently,
including the BBC's allegation that the U.S. Army "faked"
much of the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, and the Baghdad
Museum "looting" story. Nothing is too big or too small: A
radical left journalist such as Robert Fisk of the London
Independent, finds his copy being forensically examined by
bloggers to show that one story requires him to have been in
two locations at the same time, and that in another, where he
claims to have been writing from "behind Iraqi lines", it was
from a town the U.S. Army had already occupied.
Not all these stories get retracted. There is a learning curve,
and many newspapers and broadcasters have yet to discover
what public relations professionals did long ago: that if you
don't retract a falsehood promptly and completely, far more
damage will be done to your credibility than if you do. Others
are learning, mostly the hard way, that the age of blogging has
arrived.
In principle, it is a reversion to and extension of the invention
of the footnote, by the scholastics in the High Middle Ages.
This was one of the great advances of Christendom -- the idea
that the truth should be sourced, precisely -- though it
entailed, as Ivan Illich argued, a compensating loss -- the
transformation of "reading as prayer" to "reading as
learning".
That aside, the political implications expand, as the
possibilities for news management by an overwhelmingly glib
and "liberal" media establishment contract. And likewise in
the nearly closed shop of academia: for the rapid advance of
academic blogging will soon put paid to much of the rubbish
which passes for scholarship today. For those living under
tyrannical regimes in the "Third World", access to alternative
information improves with imported technology. In Iran, for
instance, the number of bloggers has recently exploded,
leaving the ayatollahs with only the bad option of unplugging
the entire country from the outside world.
Truth and freedom have usually marched together. In the
larger view, blogging does not threaten print, but enhances
and extends it. The web is now offering both media and world
a new and powerful truth serum.
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun 08 Jun 2003 - 21:43:42 GMT