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Notes for Bloggercon Journalism Session New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at.
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Boehlert: Do you think the attack on the press is a way to eliminate a national point of reference on facts?
Suskind: Absolutely! That's the whole idea, to somehow sweep away the community of honest brokers in America -- both Republicans and Democrats and members of the mainstream press -- sweep them away so we'll be left with a culture and public dialogue based on assertion rather than authenticity, on claim rather than fact. Because when you arrive at that place, then all you have to rely on is perception. And perception as the handmaiden of forceful executed power is the great combination that we're seeing now in the American polity.
So what are you left with? Perception and, increasingly, faith. Think about faith. Try to anchor that in the traditional public dialogue of informed consent in America, which has in large measure at least been based on discernible reality and on facts that can be proven -- not only facts coming out of the government but facts people feel in their own lives.
--From Eric Boehlert's Salon interview with Ron Suskind
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Authority figures have often abused the facts, and they are now held more accountable for what they say. But the flip side of all this truth-squadding in what Mr. Shirky calls "postauthority culture" is that facts themselves becomes more open to interpretation. "It's much more difficult to get people to agree on what a fact is, or whether it's important," he said.
Political campaigns and their supporters tend to treat the atoms of reality as something to be molded, cracked and spun. Meanwhile, volunteer armies of nitpickers are taking facts down to the subatomic level where they can become as meaningless as a nose-to-canvas perspective on a pointillist painting.
-- John Schwartz's New York Times piece, "When No Fact Goes Unchecked"
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America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values -- critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed "a candid world," as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.
The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.
Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.
-- Garry Wills, "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out"
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Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.
Bloggers don't know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square -- without editors, correction policies or community standards. And so their tripe is often as vicious as it is vacuous.
Nick Coleman, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "Blogged down in Web fantasy"
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For any journalist who understands his real job - helping the public life of this nation work well - the rise of citizen comment on the Internet should be something to celebrate.
The blogosphere is a dynamic expansion of things newspapers have long done to aid democratic dialogue, from letters to the editor to experiments in civic journalism.
Many bloggers are citizens who care about facts and ideas. (Some are narcissistic boors, but let's ignore them.) Good bloggers devour information, making then a smart, skeptical audience. Any journalist who would not welcome that is a fool. Given a choice between a world of nonreaders zoning out with MTV or a posse of tart-tongued digital watchdogs, I say: Up with blogs!
Blogs may display the flaws of youth (naivete, hyperbole, self-indulgence), but I find them refreshing.
Yet, many bloggers disdain my type as clueless dinosaurs. The blogosphere is declaring its independence, even as it relies on us fogeys for its daily grist.
-- Chris Satullo, Philadelphia Inquirer, "Cries of 'media bias' hide sloppy thinking"
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What's changed is the involuntary outsourcing of fact-gathering and -checking to a growing assortment of amateurs and professionals who are largely external to the profession. What we need isn't competition between blogs and mainstream news outlets, but a working symbiosis between the two....
-- Doc Searls
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What went wrong? In part, it's the same reason that traditional media sometimes fall short on their civic duty: the low road is a well-trodden path to big readership. "In the blog world, people gravitate toward subjects that generate traffic," says Gillmor. "The more raucous you are, the more page views you get." Also, while Big Media must answer for any missteps or favoritisms, bloggers seldom do.
I celebrate the liberating tools that let people post their thoughts unfiltered. But as with many other utopian predictions about how the open nature of the Net will create arenas that transcend foibles of the physical world, our faults have followed us to cyberspace. We were promised a society of philosophers. But the Blogosphere is looking more and more like a nation of ankle-biters.
-- Steven Levy, Newsweek, "Memo to Bloggers: Heal Thyselves"
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Elevating the debate is not a story. News reporters do not write about the growth of good, analytical or explanatory journalism. Media critics do not praise such work. It does not get attention, and rarely wins the praise it deserves. That doesn't mean it's unimportant, however. Serious discussion does change people's minds and improve their understanding over time, and blogging has proven a marvelous source of "elevated" discourse. Fortunately, there are some great bloggers out there (many of them scholars using blogs to popularize otherwise academic debates) who don't seem to care whether they ever get invited to go on TV or whether Howard Kurtz ever writes about them.
-- Virginia Postrel
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Got this in my work mailbox today. Hand delivered.
Well, that's the end of the line for me. Since I often sit at the wire desk and make decisions about which national and international news stories get published in the next day's edition of the ------ ------, the line about "may not contain content dealing in any way with the subject areas that the employees cover or reasonably might be expected to cover" precludes me from writing about current events in any form.
-- Former blogger Doug Harper
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Another unintended consequence for NPR was when the on-line magazine Slate announced that, of its 49 employees, 45 planned to vote for Kerry.
Newspaper editorial endorsements for candidates are nothing new.
But NPR's Day To Day has an editorial association with Slate. Slate journalists go on NPR in order to be openly partisan in an edgy, hip sort of way as befits the younger, edgier people who work for Slate and who, presumably, might also listen to Day To Day.
But that announcement caught many listeners by surprise, including Todd Heinrich:
Day To Day's host Alex Chadwick interviewed Slate editor Jacob Weisberg to explain his magazine's unexpected burst of editorial candor:
That may be fine for Slate, but more problematic for NPR. Other news organizations find it difficult to resist the temptation to blend opinion and fact-based reporting. NPR has, in my opinion, an affirmative obligation to make it clear to the listeners what is reporting and what is opinion. Many listeners expect NPR to know the difference and to keep a clear separation between the two. Will Day To Day and other NPR programs now feel obliged to consort with conservatives in order to maintain its balance? I am not sure how this best serves the listeners.
-- NPR Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin
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