All The News That's Fit To Debate

Another debate between the blogosphere and the main stream media (MSM) seems to be surging up again. These altercations centrally concern the validity of news put out by what the bloggers perceive as biased and sloppy press corps, acting on their own political agendas rather than with a geunine desire to report the facts.

It's a good thing for the press to have critics, just as it's a good thing for everyone to have them - after all, it is through criticism that we principally polish and progress our skills in whatever we do.  But when criticism becomes both argumentative and personal in nature, it often misses the point and ends up confusing an already complex issue rather than clarifying the issues which need to be addressed. It is with this in mind that we should approach this latest squabble.

Yesterday, Michelle Malkin reported that the Associated Press is now covering - five months later - the capture and detaining of press photographer Bilal Hussein by the U.S. military, whose work, she claimed in an August 12 post on her blog, has "raised serious, persistent questions about his relationship with terrorists in Iraq and whether his photos were/are staged in collusion with the enemy." It's quite a long and complex story so I'll boil it down: the allegation is that Hussein was working alongside terrorists in order to grab exclusive photos for Associated Press. Michelle Malkin's response to September 19's AP release on the story was that "it's spin time. The Associated (With Terrorists) Press is now waging a p.r. campaign against what it calls the "so-called blogosphere" over detained photographer Bilal Hussein." She went on; "After five months of stonewalling, the "so-called reporters" at AP finally reported what this blog reported on April 12--that Hussein had indeed been captured by the US military in a Ramadi apartment building where bomb-making materials were found...along with an alleged al Qaeda leader. Hussein reportedly tested positive for traces of explosives." Her big problem with AP was two-fold: why so late, and why the continued insinuous defence of their photographer rather than the acceptance that they got it wrong?

Then there's Brendan Nyhan. Mr. Nyhan was asked by American Prospect to write a column criticising the media. As he notes in yesterday's  homily, the idea struck him as rather odd given the U.S. media's bias towards the left and the fact that "the Prospect is a liberal magazine ... but I assumed they knew who they were hiring.  I was wrong." As he goes on to explain, he "slammed two liberal blogs for using an airline employee's suicide after 9/11 to take a cheap shot at President Bush." The piece he found question with, which appeared on the popular left wing blog Atrios, commented that "The American Airlines ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta on 9/11 later committed suicide - unlike the man in charge who, being briefed on the potential threat, told his briefer, "Okay, you’ve covered your ass." Mr. Nyhan's point was that this was the loss of a human life, and that the post was "politicizing a suicide". Regardless, pressure from left wing bloggers and letters of complaint to American Prospect prompted the editor to order the columnist to stick to criticising only right wing blogs, an offer Mr. Nyhan declined along with handing in his resignation.

These are two quite different, but nevertheless prescient examples of the emotions so prevalent in the debate over the blogosphere vs. the media. One concerns the reporting of hard facts, the other is about 'opinion journalism'. Nevertheless, both show a disappointing flavour of personal - rather than objective - attack which only undoes the real goal.

It's worth bearing in mind here first what the real goal in journalism is all about, be it opinion or fact: an honest and upfront package of news-delivery, in a format everyone can understand. On the first count then, Michelle Malkin has good reason to be angry: cooperating with terrorists in order to get an exclusive - and a staged exclusive at that - is at its best, ethically conspicuous. But due to her personalisation of the attack, her partisans are incentivised to go one further; they would have journalists make no ethical judgement calls at all. This is just counter-intuitive. Every profession which serves a crucial role to society, be it banking, medicine, law or journalism, involves at times making judgement calls based on a limited knowledge of the facts and which may turn out to
be for the worst, and by which by fat the bulk of which the professional has to go by is his or her own ethical assesment of the situation and the inherent trade-offs. It's not that Michelle Malkin is wrong to lambast AP for this fiasco (which admittedly they've dug themselves into) - her fine reporting skills do a justice to clarifying the facts in a complex situation, for sure. But by making her attacks so personal, and by bringing the blogosphere vs. media debate into the fray, she undoes much of the constructive work she has set out to achieve by beginning a whole new - and arguably less worthwhile - polemic.

And there's a vague sense of hypocracy in Michelle Malkin's criticism of the main stream media, too, for it was exactly there that she learned all the skills which have equiped her with the means to attack this story on her blog.

Wall Street Columnist and author Jeremy Wagstaff today writes on his blog, loose wire, "Media companies (itself shorthand for mass media) are no longer about content, and all about the medium. For the past 80 years the mass media has been about leveraging the technologies available to deliver standardized content over as large an area/population as possible. Now it’s about using the technologies available to enable as large a population as possible to swap their own content." This is disappointing to hear from a seasoned columnist, indeed. For, to continue with the example above, it is not the fact that Ms Malkin is writing this report on her blog that is the most important thing here, it is the fact that she is a good reporter with a strong sense for when something does not add up, and has the ability to deliver on it. Whether she publishes on her blog, in The New York Times, or in a fanzine is irrelevant - in other words, quite the contrary to what Mr. Wagstaff is saying, it is misleading to get side-tracked into a debate on medium, when content is what it's about.

The medium is changing, but this is nothing new. One hundred years ago most newspapers did not have pictures; now they do. So what? The act of news reporting and delivery is what the economics of journalism is about.

Here, Mr Nyhan's story is particularly disheartening news, for both the main stream press and for the blogosphere. For the media set, it is sad to see a logically valid and justifiable attack affect their strategy to criticise and seek the truth. What Mr. Nyhan was saying was completely defendable, after all: remark about how the flight attendant who let the terrorist responsible for one of the 9/11 attacks onboard committed suicide whereas President Bush did not is, whatever your view, politicising a suicide (i.e. making an inherently political point by using the example of a suicide). Atrios and left wing bloggers' criticism of the piece should have been water off a duck's back to the chiefs at American Prospect, but instead, they chose to withdraw and alter their original, admirable and truth-seeking strategy.

But it's also bad news for the blogosphere, more than anything because it shows one pivotal fault with bloggers: they are often unable to accept forms of criticism constructively or lightly. One of the strengths which news reporters are forced and trained to aquire early on is to accept and digest criticism in a way which can continue to improve their work, largely through having to re-work countless versions of the same piece until their editor is content (which in itself is rare). Those that do not acquire this skill don't stick around for long; it's usually as simple as that. If bloggers intend to become a widely-received outlet for news reporting, criticism and humility are qualities they mjust learn, and this story is a classic example of that. You can't always get it right - not as a trader, not as a doctor, not as a judge, and not as a journalist. Because of the intensely personality-driven nature of blogging, many bloggers become emotional about criticism that would be best received thoughtfully.

It is unclear exactly what the aim of bloggers who denounce the media is, too. Would they have us a society with multiple 'citizen journalists', all running around with their cell phone cameras and writing from their laptops in wireless internet cafes as and when they are on-site? I don't mean this derogatorally; after all, I write a blog, and I sometimes use it to report events which I think are interesting to others. But a world without newspapers, without magazines, without television would derive us of much of the rich cultural and linguistic development we have today and have had for centuries, for all these mediums provide one unified platform for their expression.

Certainly, the world is changing, and technology is bringing with it an empowering force to the individual. But the individual can still monitor, criticise and scrutinise the corporation and live in harmony with it. That's what the media, science, politics, the courts, and the democracy we have fought for are all about. Let that be the case, not the more violent alternative.