Get Herald RSSWhen soon-to-be former Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., came to Brown last week, he was a class act. Shays provided thoughtful and candid insight into the state of political affairs despite having been defeated only days before in an upsetting race.
As much as I appreciated Shays' remarks, I take issue with his perceptions of the media. His critique of news sources specifically targeted blogs, characterizing them as purveyors of misinformation.
Shays is not the only person calling out blogs these days. His comments brought me back to an altercation that took place on the sports program "Costas Now" between Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger and Will Leitch, founder of the sports blog Deadspin. Bissinger unleashed a torrent of anti-blog sentiments on Leitch, claiming that they are "dedicated to cruelty" and lack "journalistic integrity."
Shays and Bissenger suggested that because blogs usually aren't fact-checked and are often simply opinions, they ordinarily misinform readers.
Bissinger's rant was not as intelligent or well-intentioned as Shays' critique. Shays also deserves more credit than Bissinger for conceding to a questioner that he didn't mean to suggest that every single blog was a vehicle for misinformation. Nevertheless, the sentiments they expressed are essentially the same. They believe that the blog as a medium is inherently suspect.
Anti-blog sentiment ignores the fact that blogs aren't going away as information sources. If anything, they will become more widely used (and useful) in the future. They should be judged based on what they are - an emerging medium.
People like Bissinger and Shays are too quick to reflexively lash out against blogs as a media form. Most of their qualms concern specific blogs, not blogs in general. The Internet is a crazy place, and there are countless blogs that bring little to the table aside from craziness. But when you read a bad book, you don't conclude that books are bad. In the same vein, when you read a bad blog, you should not say, "blogs are bad."
Shays obviously knows this because he backed off his initial statements about blogs during questioning. It's hard to believe that any informed critic of blogs thinks that they are all worthless. Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman blogs, and I first heard about Bissinger's comments through a blog by Joe Posnanski, widely considered one of the best sportswriters around. These writers don't suddenly lose their talent or desire to report accurately when they get home from their day jobs and blog.
Yet while you don't often hear someone attacking newspapers or television as media when something they read or see irks them, blogs as a medium seem to take much of the heat that should be directed at specific blogs. Periodicals and television shows are presumed innocent of bias, shoddy research and other media sins until proven guilty. By contrast, people expect the worst from blogs.
This is an unfortunate phenomenon, and one that distracts from more pressing issues of media practice. All types of media are guilty of some degree of poor reporting, and deserve to be judged by stricter standards.
In today's society, newspapers, magazines and television are still the preeminent sources of information. When journalists screw up the stakes are bigger because people trust traditional sources of news more than blogs. In fact, when Shays cited specific examples of poor reporting from his recent Congressional race, they mostly involved newspapers.
Many of the most disturbing media trends are taking place in the mainstream, not the blogosphere. Media conglomerates leave us with only a few voices and a multitude of questions about objectivity and conflicts of interest, and local news is a dying tradition.
The advent of blogs may help overcome these problems. Bloggers can remain outside the sphere of corporate influence more readily than reporters (who are usually employed by the very corporations they may be reporting on). They can also report on local stories that larger news organizations decide to ignore.
Blogs may lack the accountability of newspapers or TV stations, but technology is closing the accountability gap. Blog rating organizations already exist, and greater demand for this type of service will help people discriminate between informative and inaccurate blogs.
It is clear that blogs as a medium can serve as a useful alternative to other information sources in print and on television or radio. Bad blogs do not diminish the value of good ones. Hopefully blogs will soon be seen not as a threat, but as an opportunity for advancement.
Dan Davidson '11 wants everyone to link to this column.
