Atrios has a post up on the NPR Ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin and his response to bloggers posting and commenting on the report of the killing of the Italian Secret Service agent.
Shorter Dvorkin "Bloggers amoral and bad, NPR (and the media) saintly and good".
So I had to write Mr. Dvorkin a letter:
Mr. Dvorkin,
Wow. What incredible whining, and at internet speeds no less! I'm guessing that although you look old enough to remember the Pentagon Papers, you were serving humanity as a hermit in a Monastery. Or something. Why do I assert this?
Several reasons:
"Second, the blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules. The consequences for misbehavior are still vague. The possibility of civic responsibility remains remote. It is a place where the philosophy of "who posts first, wins" predominates."
Yeah, unlike the news business where getting "scoops" is the name of the game. Please tell me that if an NPR reporter got an earth shattering exclusive like say, being in on the capture of Osama bin Forgotten, they would just sit on the story until it had filtered through every layer of the media from 24/7 cable to the Enquirer before running it. A blogger will no more sit on something newsworthy than your reporters would. And Amoral? Interesting that tonight ABC News will be trashing Fox's American Idol judge Paula Abdul with a story done by Chris Vlasto a "producer" whose previous major obession in life was a certain blue dress. Please don't use the words "moral" and "news" together, it's sort of like "jumbo shrimp" or "military intelligence". Big Journalism's morality is whatever they think it is at the moment the story runs.
Next:
"Those who rely on the Internet as their primary source of news keeps growing compared to other media sources. This group also considers Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, to be the most trusted television anchor".
Why not? He's more upfront with the fact that he's selling bullshit than any other talking head on TV or anywhere else in the media. Blogs are popular precisely because many, many of us are tired of the Gwen Ifill's and Nina Tottenbergs and others at NPR/CPB (and virtually every other "MSM" outlets) coziness with those they are supposed to be watching. There is no point in watching the "MSM" for news, they seem to do a pretty damn fine job of repeating press releases from the White House and the Christo-Fascist republicans, else they be accused of that dreaded 'liberal bias'. I mean they had the Jeff Gannon story for months before it broke in the blogs and what did they or YOU do with it? Not a damned thing. If John Aravosis at Americablog.org had not gotten the story out there, old Gannon-Guckert would still be in the WH Pressroom rubbing shoulders with NPR reporters among others, lobbing softballs to our Beloved Leader, Preznit Mission-still-not-Accomplished. And no one from your organization (and to be fair, the rest of the WH Press Corpse) would be looking askance at him for it.
Finally:
"Can the MSM adopt any blog values to attract the younger audience? Or should we wait and see? Perhaps these younger people will outgrow these youthful informational indiscretions and come to their senses -- and back to media that can serve them best..."
Serve them best? You're a funny guy. The growth in blogs is, I think correlatable to the lack of actual, professional reporting that NPR and others do in presenting a balanced picture of the state of America today.
For some reason, you seem to think that our finding a voice in the national discourse is wrong and that we as bloggers should be silent and defer to our 'betters' at NPR and elsewhere. There are many fine bloggers who have left the established media, whose body of work as bloggers stands on its own. David Neiwert at Orcinus for instance. Since you must have some background as a journalist to be the "ombudsman" at NPR, I'll leave it to you to be a journalist and find others on both sides of the aisle who are being bloggers and journalists, and doing a damn fine job of it. Me, I'm just an unapolgetically hyper-partisan egg-tosser who wants his country back from the zealots and whackos in charge right now. On any good day, maybe 400 folks read my blog, so I'm not talking to huge numbers of folks but think about the fact that I'm pretty typical in terms of reach and multiply that by however many political blogs exist. That's a lot of eggs being tossed every day in both directions.
I liken blogging to the pamphleteering of the era of the Founding Fathers. Their voices were heard, and look what came from it. From the wikipedia:
A pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who creates or distributes pamphlets in order to get people to vote for their favourite politician or to articulate a particular political ideology. A famous pamphleteer of the American Revolutionary War was Thomas Paine. Today a pamphleteer might communicate his missives by way of weblog, but before the advent of telecommunications, those with access to a printing press and a supply of paper used the pamphlet as a means of mass communications outside of newspapers or full-fledged books.
You liken blogging to a cacophany of noisy children who need to be spanked, but now that you've decided to spank us, we've gotten big enough collectively to ignore you and keep making noise and you're frustrated.
Sorry 'bout that. The times they have changed, and you need to accept it and find a way to deal with it. Become part of the solution and quit whining about the problem.
Respectfully,
Jo Fish
Democratic Veteran
usndemvet.com/blog
I seriously doubt that Dvorkin will respond, even if he carefully reads the letter. He's sold his soul and knows his responsibility is to parrot the daily Fascist talking points.
Truth is a very flexible object when reporters and journalists, who once considered themselves on the front lines of democracy, are terrified of the WH.
posted by: Lurch on 05.05.05 at 10:50 PM [permalink]
Well, he'd be a damn fool if he didn't offer you a job... great piece!
The fall of NPR and PBS is almost predictable, or it should have been... where else can President Bush, Inc. find an already set up national governmental media outlet than these? And all he has to do is find a way to get some good ol' boys in there runnin the shew...
They have fundraisers don't they? Our local NPR does, every three months... if they keep careening to the right they'll not get another dime out of me.
If one thinks about it, internet blogging and people who read blogs have saved a whole lot of trees by now.
Fox news is like the rotten apple in the proverbial barrel. When the other "news" organizations gave Rupert's disinformation machine a free ride and didn't challenge the accuracy of what Fox news reported, then all the formerly reputable news organizations became suspect, in my mind, in their own reporting.
In the 1990s, Clinton's White House was challenged constantly by Republicans in Congress and by the White House Press "Corpse" (great turn of phrase). Now, one can't get a straight answer from any of the Bushies or any of the Republicans in Congress, because most of the time straight, hard-nosed questions aren't being asked...except by bloggers who want the truth and nothing but the truth. Until the MSM gets their act together, I will turn to blogs for "the news." (Of course, once the Dems regain the White House, the MSM will go into 24/7 attack mode again like in the 90s).
As a freedom-loving U.S. citizen, I abhor censorship. Censorship is what tyrants do. And tyrants are an anathema to any democracy. So, the WH press conferences, in essence, are censored. Reports out of Iraq are censored. The MSM has self-censored their vital role as protectors of our First Amendment. PBS censors. NPR censors. Goss has censored the CIA. Bolton has been nominated to censor the U.N.. Censors of one political or religious stripe after another are running amok in our democracy. And my answer? Fuck the censors before they fuck our freedoms.
Oh, BTW, and not a single so-called Christian who advocates censorship based on their twisted understanding of Jesus is really a Christian. Jesus didn't censor. He was the one who was censored? He reminded his disciples that as he was treated, so would they be treated. And they were censored, too. Until the Catholic bishops brutally seized control of Christianity and began to do what? Censor, of course. And what do most Protestants do? Censor. Jesus said "love they neighbor." He didn't say "censor them." You would think after all these centuries that people would have realized that Christianity, in the main, stopped being Christian a long, long time ago. So, whenever I see a so-called Christian advocating censorship, I know they aren't really Christian, but instead have adopted the same mentality as the killers of Jesus Christ. Is that simple enough?
posted by: Paul Sorrells Vet 2 on 05.07.05 at 04:19 AM [permalink]
