Feb 9
Dangerous bloggers
Thanks to Davids Medienkritiek, Guido has recently stumbled across this latest attack on blogging by a Media representative. Under the banner of “research” one Doctor Thomas Lief, a reporter on the German South Western televison broadcasting system, has declared that “Bloggers are often Narcissistic Egocentrists” . Well, its good to know that we can all be categorised so neatly, presumably the good Reporter/Doctor has a degree and doctorate in Psychology, so will know exactly what he is talking about. Particularly when it comes to pronouncing on the subject of bloggers lack of “journalistic standards and objectivity”.
According to him, journalism is losing its standards and declining in its objectivity because of bloggers. It is we who have undermined the standards, and lack objectivity, being concerned only with promoting our own egos at the expense of truth and fact. Well, I am sure I have a problem answering that, especially since I only took up blogging a couple of years ago, and had been having problems dealing with slewed facts, twisted facts, inaccurate information and plain old fashioned biased reporting for some time before that. Let’s see now, what exactly are these journalistic standards we fail to measure up too …
– doorstepping and staking out celebrities? – publishing apologies for wrongful reporting in small type on the bottom of an inner page when the original story ran front page and banner headline? – presenting selected facts which hype up a story and ignoring the facts which would balance it? – pushing a particular “party line” which happens to be the editors or publishers preferred view at the expense of balance? – sensationalising particular events or crimes which accord with the current PC line of politics and help sell more newspapers? – selective editing of interviews which present a picture different to the one which would have been created if the entire interview was presented unedited and unspun? – setting up honey traps and straight forward entrapment situations to capture embarassing comments from public figures?This sounds very much a case of the pot calling the saucepan a different shade of a dark hew here! The examples given in Medienkritiek and taken from the paper that the interview was given too make very illuminating commentary. OK, the author has selected ones which illustrate just one aspect, the manner in which the US President and the US itself is presented in much of the EU as a dangerous cowboy incapable of behaving rationally. It must also be said that the media, in the form of Hollywood this time, pushed the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 911 as “documentary, which it most categorically is not. Certainly it draws on real people, real dialogue and real events, but it has been re-arranged and edited so cleverly that anyone not on the inside of this story would not appreciate that some of the dialogue the film presents as preceding the Twin Towers incident, is taken from meetings which took place after the event. These are stitched together with cleverly written and entirely fictitious dialogue which creates the appearance of credibility – until it is properly scrutinised and one learns the Michael Moore would sell his soul to the Devil if he thought it would bring down G W Bush and replace him with whichever Democrat candidate he preferred. Who knows, perhaps he already has sold his soul, he certainly won’t be the first, and he is unlikely to be alone.
Guido is certain that the reason that Bloggers are suddenly coming under scrutiny by the media is that they have woken up to the fact that no one accepts their reports as accurate anymore. We all have a bias in some way or another, and it inevitably will come through in the way we see events or interpret reports and conversations, the problem the media face is that they have slanted their reporting to one particular end of the political spectrum for so long, they simply believe that they alone now represent the unbiased centre ground, and the explosion of counter opinion as shown on blogs is unsettling this vision, and causing them to question why the blogs are apparently so far from where they think the political centre is.
It is one of the more amusing things in Guido’s life that once he was considered by his colleagues and political Masters to be to the Far Left of the Kremlin, but is now considered by the same group to be to the Far Right of Genghiz Khan, yet, in fact, he has not changed his political view point at all, but the political world has changed around him. At the end of the day, what concerns him most is that the media should be open, honest, accurate and fair. Far to often public hysteria is whipped up for dishonest motives to promote a particular response from the legislature, or push a particular political philosophy and far too often the public suffer for it in the long term.
If blogging can help to change that, then call me all the names you like Dr Lief, but I’ll keep blogging!
2 Comments so far
Actually the good Doctor has a Ph. D. in Political Sciences. I’ve read through the whole of the original interview (Davids Medienkritik gives only two of the questions) and he is not saying that journalism is losing its standards and declining in its objectivity because of bloggers. Quite contrary! When asked “Do you really think that weblogs are no danger for classical journalism (Sind Sie tatsächlich der Ansicht, dass von Weblogs keine Gefahr für den klassischen Journalismus ausgeht?)” his answer is “Absolutely. (Absolut)”. What he says in the interview is that blogs usually offer people’s personal opinions and must basically be viewed as diaries. I can easily go along with that. It is what makes blog reading really interesting: getting so many different views from so many different people all over the world. Professional or classical journalists on the other hand should in Dr Leif’s opinion not air their personal views but write a well researched story relying on different sources. According to Dr Leif most bloggers never had a journalistic training. One of course sometimes wonder if all the journalists had one. And it is certainly true that if you have to make a living out of story writing just putting down the plain facts won’t take you very far. But what Dr Leif really finds fault with in his interview is the way a great number of professional journalists seem to conduct their investigative part of work: they are just googling and don’t verify their sources anymore. It is so easy to find all sorts of information on the net, much easier than going out and interviewing a lot of people yourself. The full text of the interview can be found at http://www.webwatching.info/interviews.php?id=5
IMHO bloggers are perfectly entitled to be as narcissictic and egocentric as they wish to be!
Thanks for putting that right, perhaps ifd we had been able to access the original German transcript it might have been clearer. Let’s hope that someone takes note of his critique and that standards of journalism – particularly investigative journalism – improve.