COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Via The Last Call, Gary Trudeau is buying into the media misinterpretation of the blogging phenomenon:

Isn't blogging basically for angry, semi-employed losers who are too untalented or too lazy to get real jobs in journalism...

I mean, if half the market really valued what you say, wouldn't somebody pay you for it?

I suppose it's human for journalists who've been stung, or who have seen their friends stung, by blogger criticism, to sort of lash out. You know, like spoiled children. But this sentiment misses the mark in a lot of ways.

First of all, it assumes -- without basis in fact -- that bloggers are semi-employed. But the fact is that many of the most successful bloggers are very much employed. And some are at the very top of their professions. Others are successful in academia, or are otherwise proven professional and personal successes.

Second, it assumes - without basis in fact - that bloggers are more angry, in the aggregate, than professional journalists. But journalists don't enter the field without passions of their own. And many of them are quite angry about something or other.

They're a lot like everyone else in that regard. I mean, is someone going to try to tell me that Maureen Dowd, Bill O'Reilly, Chris Matthews, don't have moments of pique? And haven't had them throughout their careers?

Anyone want to argue that Howell Raines, still smarting from his own blog-accelerated self-destruction during his tenure at the New York Times, isn't angry himself?

Anyone want to argue that a certain New York Based professional journalist whose identity I shall keep to myself out of friendship who last August, during the Republican Convention, compared the campaign to reelect George Bush to a campaign to reelect Pol Pot, isn't angry?

Clearly that isn't the case.

Third, Doonesbury assumes that the stuff we see in the mainstream media is written by professional journalists. Much of it, however, is written by underpaid and desperate stringers, who are themselves much more marginally employed than most bloggers. Indeed, much of the coverage in Iraq relies on the reporting of unidentified (and thus publicly unaccountable) Iraqi stringers, whose reports are then consolidated under an American byline and published without mentioning the fact that the bylined reporter has made no independent verification of the contents of the stringers' reports.

Fourth, the Doonesbury piece assumes that those journalists who are employed full-time are employed full-time because anybody gives a rats ass about what they have to say. The fact is that they are not. People value the information in the reports. It is very rare, indeed, that a person buys a paper to read a report based on the byline of the author.

Even someone like Seymour Hersh gains his market value as a reporter not from his own commentary or analysis, but because of his unparrallelled access to disgruntled Pentagon sources. We care about what the sources may have to say. Someone like Hersh is but a conduit. And reporters, almost without exception, do their best writing when they become masters of negative capability, and simply become a medium to transport the reader to another time and place, and present the readers with new information.

And how can it be otherwise? A journalism degree qualifies a journalist to do nothing more. There is no magic pill that a professional reporter can swallow that makes his or her own professional knowledge of nonjournalism subjects worth a dime, nor can a few years as a journalist trump the considered opinions of those who, for example, have been immersed in military and logistical questions every day of their careers for years and decades longer than the journalist.

And this is a trap for journalists who rely on their own limited candlepower to lend "perspective" to events they themselves are simply ill-equipped to understand. And the war in Iraq serves as a constantly renewing example of the failure of journalism to recognize its own biases and limitations.

Fifth, Doonesbury ignores the fact that many bloggers, who are themselves recognized professionals and even experts in their field, are in fact plying their knowledge, full-time, and professionally. When Vodkapundit blogs on the law, he knows what he's talking about. When Steve Jobs and Bill Gates blog about technology, nobody can say it's because they're underemployed losers. When Jeff Jarvis blogs about media, it's from the perspective of someone who has himself worked in media and media marketing for a decade longer than many reporters have even been alive.

Examples of bloggers lending their expertise to the public as a public service exist in abundance. Overpressure.com is written by an ordnance and explosives expert. When Don Luskin blogs about finance, he's blogging as someone who's spent years coming up with stupid investing ideas (Democratically run mutual funds, anyone?)

Yeah, I'm having fun at his expense. But Luskin's a knowledgable guy.

When Stephen Bainbridge blogs about corporate law, he blogs as someone with nationally recognized stature in the field.

When this blog originated in Iraq, I wrote as someone who was an expert in small unit operations, convoy operations, and the weaponry and equipment of that time and place. It was an expertise which my government paid me for, full-time, but which was not acquired overnight, but as a result of a long process of specialized study, training, and experience that began nearly 17 years ago. (Christ, has it been that long???)

I started the blog as a hobby and a public service, and as a way to reach editors and reporters, whom I hoped to attract as readers. I also wrote it because I knew what a lousy job they were doing reporting the war, and I also knew that they were ill-equipped to make improvements because of the vast culture gap separating today's professional journalist from the American soldier, and those who understand and study warfare.

Many bloggers bring an expertise of their own that dwarfs that of any journalist on the beat.

By the way, many bloggers are better and livelier writers than most journalists. (So if a journalist doesn't have the background to understand a story, and can't out write some of the experts, then what, exactly, is the value they're adding to the table?)

Sixth, Doonesbury assumes that even professional journalists are employed for a reason. But there's an ontologocal problem with that reasoning: The population he refers to is employed BY DEFINITION. It is simply impossible to assign any meaningful significance to their employement statistics because there's no correlation and no causality to point out. You have simply taken a select sample. You can't ascribe any more significance to the employment status of professional journalists, who are by very definition employed, than you can to the fact that the jelly beans in a pile you've created are yellow when you yourself created the pile by looking for and selecting yellow jelly beans.

All in all, if this is the reasoning the (I hate this term) "elite media" uses to justify their position, and set themselves apart from and above bloggers, then they're in more trouble than I thought.

Good journalists should not be trying to look down on bloggers. Good journalists ought to be leveraging their skills by cooperating with bloggers, and by exploiting the advantages of pooled and collective intelligence.

There's no way a newspaper staff, for instance, working in isolation, can predictably and reliably come up with the bolt from the blue of a Buckhead writing in as a typography expert, or as someone who was intimately familiar with the format of TANG memorandums from the early 1970s.

But thousands of readers can.

The Times' experiment with Wiki editorials is on the right track. It was a false start, but it's a false start in the same sense that Da Vinci's early aircraft never got off the ground, either. But it laid the groundwork for what was to come.

Media will change. And those reporters who understand their limitations, and who find ways to leverage their own abilities with blogosphere experts, online "intelligence hives" and "expert workshops", will eventually achieve outstanding success. And they will tower professionally over those journalists who are still stuck in the old ways, trying to do everything themselves, failing to embrace new technologies and new ways of aggregating and distributing intelligence and knowledge. News aggregators are already beginning to consolidate the best of expert bloggers and combine them with basic wire service reports.

The bloggers are the mammals playing in dinosaur footprints, and are already devouring the occasional egg. And like packs of jackals in another eon, have already combined to bring down far larger specimins from older species.

Evolve or die.

Splash, out

Jason