Bottom Line: They Don't Like Poachers

I was tired of hearing paid journalists whine about bloggers the first time I heard it, or read it, being whined. Nobody likes amateurs encroaching on their territory. Of course. But the problem is not that the leading blogs are bad, as the whiners ridiculously try to make it seem.

There was the notorious Richard Schickel, who childishly asserted--about film criticism, of all things--both that "opinion" was the least part of criticism and that the unwashed blogging masses ought to have to prove their right to that same opinion before they were allowed to log it on the intertubes.

PJ O'Rourke sniffed in passing, in his last book, On the Wealth of Nations, "Freedom of speech is wonderful, if you have anything to say. A search of the 'blogosphere' reveals that hardly anyone does." Those sneer quotes just mean that PJ is enough older than me that he hates even more new jargon words than I do, but the point is taken--blogs suck, just like that, no explanation but that he didn't find anything to interest him.

And then there's the most ridiculous cut of all: blogs are worse than uppity and boring, they're bad because they put wrong information on the web. Tom Wolfe threw that one up a while ago, and Robert Novak followed suit today in an interview with, um, a blog. (JYB Tailwag: Headlines of the Creator of Worlds.) But here's the thing: Both Wolfe and Novak are griped about incorrect information on the web about themselves--and in neither case is it cited to come from any blog at all, much less leading blogs. Tom Wolfe's whine was based on Wikipedia, not on blogs. And Novak's was largely the same--he doesn't even cite which web site it was that contained the innaccuracies.

Robert Novak: I think [blogging] had a hugely negative impact for several reasons. A lot of the bloggers just put out whatever comes to their mind.

While I was promoting this book, I had an interview with NPR in New York City and they quoted something I had said to Keith Olbermann in an interview and I said, "I have never met Keith Olbermann in my life. I have never talked to him. If he asked me to go on his show, I would refuse." And the man said, "Well, I read on the internet that you said this to him."

There's more nonsense on the internet than you can believe. They have lies about me that have no connection with what I really do or what I really am. That's one aspect.

So let me get this straight: An NPR journalist, you know, the good guys who get paid to do this, cited something "on the internet" and assumed it was true? And asked you about it?

Whose fault is that again? Blogs are like anything else, including newspapers and books and the authors who write them: You only take the word of the ones you know you trust or can validate through other sources (isn't that what you're supposed to do? See, I never went to J-school). If Novak thought the masses trusted journalists implicitly before the advent of the blogs, or worse yet if he thought we should, then he was gravely mistaken. Novak himself speaks as disparagingly about Olbermann as one media person could of another, and yet he wants to discount an entire army of fact checkers, information assemblers, and opinion makers because, to cite one example, an NPR interviewer took something she or he read "on the internet" as gospel?

You know, kind of like a few people I know take what Olbermann says as gospel.

The arrogance and petulance are unbounded. The implication that journalists as a mass are to be trusted despite the rampaging evidence of misinformation and outright fabrication, juxtaposed with the assumption that blogs as a mass are to be distrusted because somebody made up something about Novak himself, is highly irresponsible, shortsighted, illogical, and ultimately just somebody pitching a fit about poaching on what he sees as his preserve. Sorry, Mr. Novak. The facts are everybody's preserve, and blogs go a long way towards getting them straight, longer in many cases than your paid journalists.

UPDATE: Leave it to Ace:

No one -- no one -- ever got into the media to report on local car collisions or new and exciting federal farm subsidies.

What they got into the media to do was to tell people how and what to think, and its that prerogative of the Intellectual Aristocracy, and not the unglamorous business of information collection, collation, and dissemination, that they're crying about losing. ... So instead they have to make the argument dishonestly -- whining about a job that isn't seriously threatened in order to preserve the job they really fret about losing, but a job which no one ever asked them -- let alone beatified them -- to do. How reporters got conflated with analysts and general-purpose experts without portfolio is anyone's guess. But that conflation having been made (at least in the minds of some, particularly their own), they'll be damned if they're going to give that gig up now.