You Ain't Never Gonna 'Mount to Nothin'

If there were an easy way to do so--aside from using an overly long title--I would have subtitled this post: How Blogs Stab Themselves in the Back. It's painted in broad strokes, and, in generalizing, doesn't dwell on the exceptions to the rules. It also applies to the overtly political blogs, not the journal/sexual/photo/lit/ blogs.

Every few weeks or months an event occurs that causes blogs to bask in the warm glow of their own relevance. Whether it's a politician not being held accountable for their words and actions or the mainstream media relegating a story to the back pages that deserves front page attention, blogs have, on occasion, forced issues that might otherwise have died away. There follows much backslapping and self-satisfaction--which is all good and proper.

But there are also those who then break out the "look, we're journalists, too" posts. The truth is that we simply aren't.

Without denying that blogs can have power to do good and useful things, without denying that many of us are extremely devoted to making our mark in the world, the fact is that blogs are of limited influence. The worst part is that we do it to ourselves.

There is a reason that success in blogging is equated with having our work published or noticed in traditional media, and that reason isn't that we are superior or act as some fifth estate check on the powers of the media. We celebrate when one of our own graduates to traditional publishing because that media has a few things that we don't; namely, wide readership and influence.

The question, though, is why? Why does traditional media continue to have such influence and legitimacy while this wonderful, brilliant world of writers remains largely unnoticed?

The first, and most obvious, reason that newspapers and TV news have more legitimacy is that they have visibility. While bloggers talk about Oliver Willis, Instapundit, Kos, and others, mentioning those names outside of our sphere will gather only blank stares and confusion. An Instapundit or Corner link may be gold coin in our realm, but it is absolutely meaningless to anyone who isn't part of our group.

Where the media talks to its readers, viewers, or listeners in their own language, we bloggers speak our own proprietary tongue. Every vocation has its own language. As a professional graphic designer, I happily throw around LPI, PMS, CMYK, LAB, and stripper around in casual conversation. At times, only another designer is likely to understand precisely what it is that I'm talking about. At times, as a blogger, only another blogger is likely to understand what I'm saying. Ours is a world of well-known names, trackbacks, pings, MT, and Expression Engine.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using this professional language--it's quick communication for people who are "in the know". But a casual reader--someone who found their way into our little world from a Google or Yahoo search--starts tripping on those names and concepts, why would we expect anything other than confusion?

Reporters have their own language, too, but they tend to keep it out of their reports. When they talk to their audience, the language that they use isn't the insular one of their profession, but terms common to a broad audience.

This is a small wall between the reader and us, though. A much greater divide comes from our lack of a set of overriding ethics and standards. As much as we complain about inappropriate editorializing and obvious political and social slant in the media, we bloggers are far guiltier of the same transgression.

Bloggers have agendas, bloggers have political leanings, bloggers have slants. We are even more judicious in the stories we run to support our opinions and we hammer on other views with the passion of demagogues. Fair and balanced commentary is rare.

We continually cover the same ground, we support our views with cherry-picked stories, and we spin with the best of DC's political handlers.

And that's assuming that the site is something more than rumor mongering, gossip, or self-aggrandizing. Wonkette and the Washingtonienne, two extremely well known and well-trafficked sites, aren't seeing their site states rise because of their insight and commentary--it's because they traffic in sex, scandal, and rumor. If either of these sites was your introduction to our community, how seriously would you take us?

Admittedly, the same could be said of The National Enquirer, but the place of news magazines, television, and dailies is far better established than

That isn't to say that we don't have our share of intelligent commentary and insight. Any day on the Volokh Conspiracy you can find some of the best analysis of events in America--well-considered, well-written, and well-supported. But for every Volokh there are hundreds of variations of the Daily Kos to wade through--sites so bitter and blinkered that they can barely admit the humanity of anyone on an opposite side of a debate, so partisan that it would take an act of God to get them to note the good in a public figure from the "other side."

While I'm never completely trusting of the Rocky Mountain News to give me news without an unfair slant, I'm not sure that I even trust myself to do a better job than they do.

While I've come to the conclusion that I can find bloggers whose analysis of events will be as good as anything that I read in the editorial pages, I have yet to find more than a handful of sites that I trust to give a fair, relatively unbiased view of daily events. When I want that, I still go and read CNN, the Reuters news feeds, and FoxNews--because even though I know that they all spin stories in their own ways, that spin isn't nearly as severe as what I read on most of my favorite blogs.

If we ever do want to be taken seriously as news analysis and outlet, then the commentary needs to be more balanced and reasonable. We also need to shift focus dramatically in our writing.

In one way, the thing that separates us from a wider readership is simple, but near impossible to overcome: where journalism in its many forms is an informational profession, blogging is a social avocation. That is, of course, one of the best things about what we do--the friendships that we build with each other and the respect and the care that those relationships engender.

I'll say it again: blogging is a social endeavor. We talk about our plans for the weekend, we talk about or personal problems and triumphs, and we have very public arguments with each other. Somewhere, in between all that, we manage to write some brilliant commentary on the world's events.

But when was the last time you opened the New York Times and read a thousand words about the personal, typically private things that you can read on any one or two of the sites on my blog roll any given day? Or on ResurrectionSong?

With a scant few exceptions, blogging isn't journalism. It's a series of social interactions, sprinkled with news analysis, masquerading as journalism. We have a right to be proud of ourselves when we help one of our own, or when we pull together to support a good cause, or when we do push a story that the media neglected. We should pat someone on the back who acts as a fact-checker for one of those traditional outlets, forcing a retraction or an apology. We have every reason to feel that we have the potential to make a difference within our sphere of influence.

But we can't consider ourselves journalists until we begin to accept responsibility for the things that we write. A code of poli-blogging ethics, a set of standards for publication, and a more professional attitude toward our own sites would make it far easier for others to take us seriously and for us to have a wider influence. The problem is that we aren't accountable to anyone but ourselves. There is no oversight for what we've written--no Ombudsman to take us to task for our errors. And as much as a professional attitude could help, the fact is we aren't professionals.

The majority of us pay out of pocket for our domain names and our hosting without ever having the slightest hope of recouping our costs. We aren't paid for our opinions; we pay for the right to share them with others. Given that simple truth, it is almost impossible to expect that we would ever uphold more than a basic level of professionalism.

We aren't voiceless, we aren't useless, and we aren't just wasting our time. At the same time, we aren't more than what we are: a widespread group of intelligent people with the ability and the will to share their opinions with the world, the gumption to back it up on the comments section, and the hope that the little nudge that we're giving might make a difference.

Until our focus shifts from the social to the informational, until our interaction with readers becomes professional and not almost familial, and until we hold ourselves accountable to some journalistic standards, we aren't journalists.

Posted by zombyboy at May 25, 2004 10:21 AM | TrackBack