Conventional media says something good about blogs
Most of the traditional media coverage that we’ve been getting has
either been explanatory (what is a blog? What are these people
doing here?) or dismissive (They’re not real journalists, They aren’t
objective, Don’t pay too much attention to them). (Hey, at least
that’s what we’ve been getting up in the “Blogger Boulevard.”
So it’s a surprise to see this, from the Hollywood Reporter:
CNN political analyst Jeff Greenfield doesn’t buy the arguments against
blogs. He doesn’t think Internet-based media has any corner on bad
journalism.“You can be just as sloppy or bad or downright false
in established media as you can with the bloggers,” he said. “With the
bloggers, you have this added advantage that everybody’s watching
everybody else, so that if one blogger on the left makes a series of
assertions, Instapundit will weigh in and say, ‘That guy is so off
base, and here’s why.’ I think they’ve added a lot to the whole
political process.”
Ecto blogging software
28 July 2004 at 2:21 pm.
A bit of good-natured grumbling:
Bloggers and the established media industry resemble each other in another way, judging from your convention converage so far: a tendency toward narcissism. The Times said yesterday that media reps outnumbered delegates 6 to 1. Your self-reflection-to-convention-commentary numbers aren’t quite so bad, but a thought or two on, say, the political party you see shaping itself (or distorting itself) before you might be worthwhile. And what about the extraordinary Obama, the ostensible future of the party? Or, speaking of religious convictions (your topic for later), what do we say about Ron Reagan’s appeal to “science,” and its rather politically important contention that the socially constituted human beings we see around us (“with fingers and toes”) claim our attention before the unborn do? Not really a small claim in this climate of abortion anxiety (regardless of the shallowness of that debate, or of its tangential relationship to stem-cell research).
In short, I’m looking forward to your nitty-gritty! Especially the reports from the religious folk!
28 July 2004 at 7:30 pm.
Actually my favorite piece was on CNN when Anderson Cooper interviewed the young MTV correspondent on the first day of the convention. Although the segment title was on bloggers, all the two talked about was the correspondent’s new addiction to her Blackberry. Her Blackberry was like crack, everyone should have one, how did she live without it, etc. I didn’t really catch anything on bloggers and this young woman was not a blogger…or if she was they didn’t mention it, although they did mention that she had compared Anderson Cooper to her dog on a website. Aha! Maybe that’s what bloggers do.