09 June 2004 Blog Home : June 2004 : Permalink
As if the blog world hadn't noticed the Pew researchers have just released a detailed report demonstrating that Americans divide their trust in the news by political affiliation. Worse a large proportion don't seem to trust any news organization to thell them the truth. This is not good. As the VodkaPundit points out:
Only 15% of Republicans believe what they see on CBS News. The numbers are scarcely better for NBC (16%) and ABC (17%). The Times clocks in at an unsurprising by still pathetic 14%. CNN easily tops all of the above, but still slides to 26%. According to the Pew analysis, "CNN's once dominant credibility ratings have slumped in recent years, mostly among Republicans and independents."
Look folks, this is a Big Deal, and I'm not even talking about media bias per se.
For all intents and purposes, more than half of the populace (everybody except partisan Democrats, and even their numbers for credibility are nothing for most of the press to brag about) has written off the vast majority of the national press. And they're doing so because they believe that the press has written them off.
A part of the problem, it seems to me, is that "Big Media" is utterly failing in its job of getting out the news. It suffers from selection bias (e.g. Abu Ghraib got endless coverage while other tragedies at the same time such as Dharfur, the UN Oil Scam and Nick Berg's execution got limited mentions) and worse it suffers from a total inability to make incisive editorial comment. What we see is that Reuters (and AP etc.) journalists (who are supposed to be writing straight unbiased news) are editorializing and the Big Media is then editorializing based on the reports it gets from Ruters at al..
So where does the discerning person turn for news - well Paul Wolfowitz turns to the blogosphere: in today's WSJ he mentions two Iraqi bloggers in the same way that in the past he might have mentioned, say, Tom Friedman or Robert Novak.
After a suicide car bombing killed Iraqi Interim Governing Council President Izzedine Salim and eight others on May 17, one Iraqi put that act of terror into a larger perspective for those who wonder if democracy can work in Iraq. His name is Omar, one of the new Iraqi "bloggers,"
He's not alone. The blogosphere has provided many people with insights on Iraq, Iran and other places that just don't get coverage. Unlike Reuters and friends, blogs make no attempt to be impartial and don't hide the editorial comment. But they (almost) always link to the source material where possible and thus we get their view and the full text of what they are commenting on so we can draw our own conclusions. Where they break new ground its giving us emails from people who don't ever get in the media and then you rarely see any editorial and if you do its clear from indentation or other textual differentiation. The blog news usually attributes (e.g. this is from a Marine Captain in Fallujah) and rarely crops the comment letting it stand free to be read as a whole. Compare this to Big Media where we frequently see just soundbites from "an Iraqi" or worse "a source".
Another large difference between blogs and big media is that blogs frequently fact-check each other and usually admit errors and issue immediate corrections and/or clarifications. Partly this is because they can - its a lot harder to do this in a printed newspaper - but partly its because the can only keep readership is to be up front and clear about errors. This is I think the key difference between the Internet news resourcs such as blogs and traditional ones. Because setting up a blog is essentially free and for readers there are no switching costs a blogger who habitially fails to make corrections or admit mistakes (or otherwise condescend to his/her readership) will lose his/her readership quickly because they reders will be able to find someone else instead. Even with 200 cable TV channels and a gazillion terrestrial TV and radio stations the switching costs and startup costs are non-trivial (so you simply can't easily replace a bad one) and the printed media is even worse -- especially in much of North America the only way to get most newspapers and magazines is to buy a subscription because the local shops simply don't carry them. If you've bought a year's subscription to a magazine you sure as heck have a financial incentive to keep reading the rag even though its a lying piece of trash. Hence the incentive to issue clear corrections is absent.
The big problem with the balkanization of Big Media and with the success of the blogoshpere is the chance for incestuousness. Daniel Drezner did an article and a survey about the blogs read by influential people which indicated a certain lack of feminist perspective in that circle and there have been analyses of track back links that indicate that, apart from fiskings and flamings, bloggers tend to link to and comment on blogs of a similar political persuasion (note to self must extend blogroll). This is terrible because, as we have seen about both Iraq and the ongoing discussion of Israel/Palestine people simply cannot agree on the facts whih means that they start arguing past each other.
As the Pew report noted more and more people get their news on line. More and more people will therefore be hitting the blogosphere and in general "that's a good thing", but if they only get their news from one perspective then that's a bad thing, actually a really bad thing. And the people to blame are Big Media for blowing their impartiality.