In US News & World Report, Mort Zuckerman rails against blogs and the demise of the 'gatekeeper' model of journalism (in which Professional Journalists weed out false or defamatory stories).
Atrios' response is exactly right:
However, it isn't blogs that destroyed the Gatekeepers. It wasn't blogs that put Rush Limbaugh on as an election analyst. It wasn't blogs that gave Bill O'Reilly the flagship show on a major cable news network. It wasn't blogs that gave Michael Savage his own television show on a cable news network. It wasn't blogs that put Ann Coulter on the cover of a major national news magazine. It wasn't blogs that created all of the various and often fact free screaming heads shows. It wasn't blogs that gave syndicated columns to numerous conservatives with little or no experience in journalism. It wasn't blogs that devoted the summer of 2001 to Gary Condit (uh, ok, well, maybe Josh helped a bit)and the summer of 2005 to a missing girl in Aruba. It wasn't blogs that invented the New York Post or Washington Times....Gatekeeper media may be dead, but to a great degree they dug their own grave and dove right in. Blogs didn't really get there until after the funeral.Or, to put it another way, blogs didn't kill the gatekeeper media--they're just feasting on the corpse.
I'm a firm believer in journalistic standards (two members of my immediate family are current or former professional journalists, and I have a sense of what it entails), and in the ethic of objective coverage (in the true sense of the word 'objective'--not the lazy-ass he-said/she-said coverage that passes for 'balance' in the news media). I think it's a bad thing when people pass on badly-sourced or demonstrably false stories, even if I agree with they point they're trying to make. People who get their news exclusively from blogs had bloody well better be very selective about which blogs, because Zuckerman is right: there is a tremendous amount of stupid, bigoted, mindlessly partisan, or otherwise execrable shit out there.
But if the influence of the gatekeeper media is declining, it's their own damn fault. A gatekeeper who can't or won't distinguish between good and bad, expert and crank, analyst and partisan blowhard, news and entertainment, is utterly worthless. 'Old media' news organizations need to either start doing their jobs, or shut the fuck up.
Update: Wampum has the punchline to this story: a column in which Zuckerman himself repeated urban legends as fact. Nice gatekeeping, dumbass.
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