Quote of the month: Tim O’Reilly on journalism
What journalists do, which many bloggers have yet to learn, is to consult multiple sources and do fact checking before blurting out a story. But what bloggers do, which journalists have yet to learn, is to wear their biases on their sleeve, rather than pretending they don’t exist.
– Tim O’Reilly, (From Lessons on blogging from John Stewart)
I find better fact checking on blogs. Journalists are graduates of journalism school so they know journalism – whatever that might be. Bloggers are engineers, lawyers, doctors, geologists, typographers, veterans, teachers, chemists, writers, and (of course) computer geeks. They are distributed world wide. Among bloggers, there is almost always someone who has relevant expertise and proximity to any story.
Dan Rather’s phony Bush National Guard memos blew right through his fact checking. Blogs stopped that nonsense cold.
I can’t disagree with you. But my point, or question, is why cant blogging be the best of both? That’s how I read the quote. And I agree with the quote that it’s common for many blogs to run with single sources, and often without actually reading them.
> Among bloggers, there is almost always someone
> who has relevant expertise and proximity to
> any story.
True, but to find them isn’t easy. And there is a low signal to noise ratio. Yes, the signal often rises to the surface (to mix metaphors) but not always, and certainly not as fast as it might be if there were more respect for the good qualities of old media journalism.
Of course bloggers have a bias. Of course journalists have a bias. We are people with a background, a context, and that provides a bias.
It seems at times that journalism has become the heart of the hypocrisy industry. “We are objective,” is their cry, but people who monitor the industry always prove otherwise.
As Scott mentioned, this should be a “both and” case instead of an “either or” case. Bloggers both check facts and have a bias.
Journalism school teaches due diligence: I once heard that at the J-school of U of W Ontario, if you ever, just once, hand in a story with a single factual error then you fail…
In everyday life it is morally right to say “I think” or “I guess.” It is wrong to guess and then pretend certainty about a fact or truth. A journalist is subject to the same common morality. All of my friends have such integrity.
As a volunteer campus journalist my role was not to check facts but to attribute them, or more precisely, to attribute a person’s fact just as I would his direct quote. I could attribute “He explained…” his brochure, his tech manual, government documents and so on. If I looked up a fact, ex. “how long is the gaza strip?” then I might simply insert that fact but then the implied attribution was clearly me. If I was going by memory “I always thought that…” then I was on Scout’s honor to be right. (Can I rip off your arm if you’re wrong?)
My editor said the Europeans don’t attribute every blessed fact the way we Canadians do.
For spelling, as with memory, I was similarly expected to check if at all unsure (When proofreading: Would you bet a hundred dollars that you are right?) As a gentleman of the press I would have been very offended if another student had been appointed the newspaper’s “fact checker.”
The purpose of multiple sources is partly to show various biases and then let the reader decide. The famous lone exception was when a guy reported on the death camps without getting any Nazi quotes for balance. “Sometimes,” he said “there is no other side.”