Mainstream media's recent failings are glaring and egregious. Among them: journalist Jayson Blair's fabricated New York Times stories; commentator Armstrong Williams being bribed to promote the No Child Left Behind Act; and James Guckert, under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon, acquiring White House press credentials and reporting for the Republican-mouthpiece Web site Talon News. In a culmination of all these cases, Dan Rather last week stepped down as anchor of CBS Evening News after protracted debate about forged documents. As Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, recently quipped, "This is not a time when editors swear off alcohol."
With mainstream media looking bleak, a larger percentage of Americans are turning toward alternative sources for their news. As a consequence, in the past few years, Weblogs have grown in both popularity and influence. The Web site for Howard Dean's failed presidential campaign employed bloggers. Dozens of bloggers received press credentials for last year's Republican and Democratic national conventions. And last week, Garrett Graff became the first journalistic blogger to be granted a daily pass to White House press briefings. As John Palfrey of Harvard Law School recently said, "When bloggers get credentials in this manner ... their credibility grows. The growth of people participating in the public conversation that blogging represents is a great thing for democracy and a great thing for global cultural growth."
As the most decentralized and independent form of journalism, blogs are extremely enticing. While most television news stations and print media outlets are criticized for being members of huge media conglomerates, a blogger is nothing more than a single internet user hacking away at a keyboard. Running an independent news-and-commentary Web site is seemingly the true expression of "free media." With the credibility of mainstream media sinking and the power of blogs increasing, it seems high time to jump aboard the blog bandwagon. To hell with centralized media, right?
But before we all start hailing blogs as the next evolutionary step in free media, there are some important caveats to explore. First of all, it is important to keep in mind that bloggers are a very small percentage of Internet users. A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that somewhere between 2 and 7 percent of adult internet users maintain blogs - and of those, less than 10 percent update daily. The percentage of bloggers commanding any sort of influence online is still smaller.
According to one blogger, "Individual blogs are paragons of free expression, but the blogosphere as a whole is a democratic institution. Blogs form a kind of representative democracy, with certain popular bloggers representing broad segments of public opinion." Viewing the blogosphere as a representative democracy is inexact, however. While a representative has a formal obligation to represent his or her constituents, influential bloggers have no obligation other than to their own biased opinions. A blog is a very subjective view of the world seen through a pinhole, and to view a popular blog as something necessarily representative of a large segment of the Internet population is incorrect.
Most troubling, however, is the bloodthirsty bent seen in many blogs as of late. Instead of promoting open discussion, which should be the point of blogging, Weblogs are being used largely as a tool to target and depose mainstream figures and journalists. Last year, conservative bloggers uncovered the aforementioned bogus documents used by Dan Rather and immediately pushed for his resignation. More recently, CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan abruptly resigned after being besieged by the blogosphere for comments he made about journalists in Iraq. Furthermore, the ire directed at Harvard president Larry Summers for his comments on gender has been fueled substantially by blog posts.
Instead of promoting discourse, blogs are beginning to do the opposite. It might not be long until public figures avoid expressing any sort of opinion at all, out of fear of being crucified by a group of bloggers with no editors and no accountability. One might argue that bloggers keeping journalists on their toes is a good thing - however, where do we draw the line? When will bloggers choose to abandon the notion of promoting absolute truth in media and start deposing mainstream journalists simply from personal bias? In my opinion, many already have.
We are beginning to enter an age in which mainstream media no longer holds the relevance it once did. But despite blogging's recent growth in legitimacy, trusting in the virtue of a few independent journalists is highly dangerous.
Blogs can be a valuable tool used to promote widespread participation in journalism. However, as it seems now, blogs are quickly falling from a democratic form of reporting to one dictated by mob rule.
Nicholas Swisher '08 writes for the Brown Daily Squeal.
