I feel that that blogs and internet journalism do fit the marketplace of ideas. The internet itself is one of the greatest tools that a journalist can have, for instance a journalist can find out detailed facts about an accident that happened as close a 30 min after it has happen, also this accident could have happened in the US or in any place in the world. Let’s take on another example, last night I posted a story about a great director that had fallen into a coma. The story when I found it was only 2 and half hours old and the story took place in Rome. I feel that blogs are opening up Journalism back to its roots, that you learn by doing and not by what is considered educated minds. So yes, I feel that blogs, and internet journalism fit the metaphor.
The metaphor has changed the way that people view journalism. Now the big wigs of major companies are crying that the people are not educated in the realm of journalism. They fail to point out the fact that most people who do journalism well just stumbled into the jobs or walked in and found their calling. I feel that Peggy Noonan Argues my opinions well in her article.
Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: “Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report.” In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that’s new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That’s not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn’t carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago. In the old days a lot of interesting information fell off the editing desk in this way. Now it doesn’t. This is a public service.
I don’t know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pearson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and ’40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don’t know how Walter Lippmann or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they’d lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them–but, well, too bad. I’ve been attacked. Too bad. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.
Blogs in this time serve as a great public service not a nuisance or hindrance to the major producers.
The metaphor also fits what is happening in the cases of Dan Rather, Jeff Cannon, and Eason Jordan. These men posted information to blogs that were considered to be to offensive in nature and has come back to bite them in the preverbal Butt. AFP
Jordan, a top CNN executive responsible for the network’s coverage in Iraq resigned Friday following remarks suggesting the US military was deliberately targeting journalists.
The January 27 comments were initially ignored by mainstream reporters, but picked up and trumpeted across the Internet by an army of bloggers.
Jordan’s downfall follows that of veteran CBS television news anchor Dan Rather, who announced he will resign in March after bloggers exposed documents he used in a report critical of President George W. Bush ’s National Guard service as forgeries.
Jordan made his controversial remarks while participating in a discussion panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Organizers have not released a transcript of the event.
Jordan acknowledged the remarks were “not as clear as they should have been,” but insisted in a statement that he “never meant to imply US forces acted with ill intent when US forces accidentally killed journalists.”
These men had to resign for making a statement or a view that defined them in what they thought. The last time I checked we did live in America, and no matter what we thought or posted or used, could be used to eliminate our freedom to pursue happiness.
I also feel that the chaos and cacophony of the internet speech has strengthened that market place. I have stated before that I feel that blogs have an individual flare for each person who posts a story. This in its very nature has returned journalism to its grass roots stage, and in my opinion its better form. I feel that the ruling in the Dalzell report was preposterous, who says that the government can tell everyone in the world what to say and when to say it. We in America do still have the first amendment right, or is that going to be removed because it may allow people to really expose some of our leaders as the criminals they are. I am not in any way anti-America, but it is time for us to stand up and be a voice instead of blindly going into that good night.