I’m generally positive about the influence of blogging on the flow of information. I think it’s valuable both in terms of news and commentary and even in academic discussions. It provides a new possibility for minority ideas. It’s a good place to test ideas and to get comment on them without doing the full research that would result in an academic paper, for example.
Blogging obviously has its limitations as well. Let the reader beware. A blog entry such as this only takes a few minutes, and you don’t have any substantial way to check how accurate it is. In general, the modern age has made information much more accessible, and has also made media in general more accessible. That means that the reader has more choices and has to exercise those choices, hopefully intelligently.
Journalist Steven Levy, writing in Newsweek/MSNBC, is concerned about the retreat of some people from face to face interviews. A recent interviewer was turned down for phone interviews by several bloggers, who asked for e-mail interviews. When the journalist objected, these bloggers wrote about it on their popular blogs. I can’t help but get the feeling that a major part of the problem here was that the journalist was annoyed that he couldn’t keep the topic under his control.
Even more, however, I believe that face to face interviews, much beloved by journalists, often are not the best way to get a good idea of what’s going on. There are so many topics that require much more serious examination of the facts and a much more thoughtful response. Face to face interviews, and to an even greater extent the confrontations so loved by television journalists have a tendency to get off-the-cuff remarks, and they favor the person who can turn a catchy phrase the fastest, not necessarily the one who actually has the most in-depth knowledge of the subject, or the best judgment.
Levy concludes:
We in the journalism tribe operate under the belief that when we ask people to talk to us we are not acting out of self-interest but a sense of duty to inform the population. It’s an article of our faith that when subjects speak to us, they are engaging in a grand participatory act where everyone benefits. But these lofty views don’t impress bloggers like Rosen. “You have to prove [you represent the public],” he says. Yes, we do. But every time we lose the priceless knowledge from those essential, real-time interviews, our stories are impoverished, to the detriment of our readers: you.
Well, no, not exactly. We are not impoverished. Rather, we are enriched by the availability of new options. It takes a very tribal mindset (and Levy is right to invoke the phrase “journalism tribe”) to assume that the addition of new options and new ways for information to flow results in impoverishment.
