Bloggers are Editors and Filters For The News

The Iraq War Reader: Newspapers have abdicated their duties in getting to the "truth" of a story. [I'd add TV even more so.] Instead, in the name of objectivity, they simply report the he-said, she said on how much some new initiative will cost, as if there were no way to empirically determine the answer. Bloggers rarely link to this kind of story. The most widely-read ones seek out some piece of writing on the web where a person has actually determined the real answer, or gotten an on the record quote, or put forth an question no else has asked, and then they link to it, saying, in effect, 'If you believe me, then you can believe this.'

As blogging spreads, this is where mainstream journalism's cult of objectivity may finally meet its downfall. Because today's professional journalists are trained to avoid expressing an opinion or taking a side in a story, they end up delivering pap when readers want meat. I'm not much of a historian of journalism, but it's my impression that this was not the case a century ago, when newspapers were more openly aligned with different political parties (a situation still prevalent in Europe). I've never worshipped at the shrine of objectivity. That's because I cut my teeth at a journal of opinion (The Nation) and also because I had some great teachers, like Gloria Emerson and Andy Kopkind, who showed me how so-called temples of objectivity like the New York Times were totally political places. The difference between the Times and Pravda was that in the Soviet Union, readers knew they had to read between the lines of Pravda. Here, we have had a more effective myth of objective journalism, at least until recently.