ninme

I’m bouncing off Bubblehead again, here. He’s got this big long post up about journalism. Go read it. It’s interesting.

The thing that I find interesting about all this, is the way the blogosphere is going through generally the same growing pains the rest of the industry (news media) has gone through already.

The most recent one was photojournalism after digital photography became possible. Photoshop was invented, and film scanners were purchased. Both the scanners and the software were terribly expensive, but it was well worth getting rid of the bulky enlargers and funny red lights. (Then later, digital cameras got rid of the tubs of smelly chemicals, and the whole thing got shrunken down to a computer, and the processing rooms got turned into broom closets. But that’s later.) You could process your negatives, scan them into the computer, burn and dodge and crop, and oh look at that funny smudge on the lens… gone! Oh no, there’s a big fat ugly woman standing right next to the congressman… gone!

See where the problem is? (It was like polyester. Suddenly there was this new material and they couldn’t get enough of it, then finally someone realized that everything was made out of polyester and it was a horrible thing.) In my photojournalism class we spent a long time on this. There was that cover of National Geographic with the pyramids, and the picture was taken landscape of two pyramids with the sun setting behind it, but to fit it on the cover they had to remove a big length of empty sand to move the pyramids closer together, which they did, and hey presto! Thanks to Photoshop, they had a portrait shot for the cover. Neato! Then there was that pulitzer prize winner of the elderly couple holding up a photo in the living room (I forget the context) and later it was discovered that the photographer removed the unsightly coke bottle that had been on the coffee table.

So suddenly the journalistic photos weren’t accurately portraying the truth of the situation, and people got really upset. So rules were put in place: Only do with photoshop what you used to be able to do with an enlarger. Sure, with clever cropping you can inaccurately portray the truth of what happened, but that’s tricky to regulate.

So now we have blogs working through the same ethical problems. They’re still debating, at a big blog like PowerLine, whether bloggers are journalists. Well of course they are. But that’s okay, it’s new, and that might not be self-evident to everyone. So some people might think “Hey this is fun, and because I’m not a journalist, I don’t have to be as uptight!” Then the Dean Campaign comes by with a check, and it doesn’t really occur to them that it isn’t ethical. Even with disclosure. If regular journalists can get fired for even associating themselves with a political movement, like that woman who got canned for being spotted at the million mom march, then bloggers shouldn’t be taking money from anyone, except advertisers. But it’s fine. The kinks are being worked out.

What amazes me, however, is how sacred the journalistic ethics used to be. Journalists did get canned for being associated with political movements. My journalism teacher used to warn us in grave tones that an error in judgment (putting a picture of kids playing on a fallen tree next to a big headline and article “two killed in windstorm” was one real life example) gets you letters, and loses you subscribers. An error in ethics irreversibly damages your reputation, and without that, your paper is nothing.

And yet today, we have The Minneapolis Star Tribune publishing uncorroborated, unchecked attacks on lawyers (not smart), the ASSOCIATED PRESS slapping a story about a kidnapped doll (complete with a little teeny gun pointing at his head and a little teeny poster behind him) all over its servers, prompting this sort of mockery, and a Vice President at CNN baldly stating that American Troops assassinate journalists in public and in front of a foreign audience, many of whom are closely associated with our own enemies.

So back to Bubblehead. He thinks that journalists aren’t an intelligent breed. They aren’t. They’re a feeling one. Journalists don’t go into journalism school because they like facts, and see themselves as gophers, blind and a bit ugly, digging through the dirt looking for that tasty root that will make the story accurate. They see themselves as knights on white chargers, wielding a shining sword, saving the damsels in distress of the world (the poor, the children, women and minorities) from the evil dragon (republican politicians). Why republican politicians? Because Dan Rather had so much fun in the 70s with Nixon, and every journalist just dreams of his day to slay the dragon. (It goes without saying, of course, that those he inspired with his “slaying” of Nixon all agree generally that Nixon deserved to be slain, hence the bias now. If Rather had been a raging conservative, things could be different.)

So Bubblehead thinks they should be replaced with bloggers. I don’t think that’s a great idea. I think bloggers work because it’s so deregulated. I’m not getting paid (pout), I do it because I think it’s interesting. PowerLine does it because they have something intelligent to add to the conversation (note the difference). A reporter gets paid, he has deadlines, he can’t just go do something else when he gets bored. It’s a different world.

The similarities lie in the readership. People depend on PowerLine to tell them the truth about the Minneapolis Star Tribune. If they aren’t granted the Trib’s protections, they won’t be able to do that as well. Doesn’t mean they do the same thing to get to that point, though.

What needs to happen is standards need to be enforced. Journalists that break the rules need to be fired. Professors who get their students riled up with political speeches need to be fired. Major network Vice Presidents who plainly lie about the country his network is reporting on need to be fired. They need to get their hands around the throat of the problem, and the fact that they’re not only illustrates that there is a problem, and it’s been there since Rather took down Nixon. It takes at least that long for these kinds of lazy standards to infect the ranks all the way to the decision makers.