s skippy the bush kangaroo: great moments in journamalism

skippy the bush kangaroo



Monday, August 20, 2007

great moments in journamalism

note to latimes: when presenting an editorial chastising bloggers for not adhering to the strict tenets of journalism, it's wise to adhere to the strict tenets of journalism.

case in point: michael skube's piece yesterday chastising bloggers for...well, you know. the third paragraph of his diatribe goes:

and to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. "no man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible samuel johnson said, "ever wrote but for money." yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. and not just write. many of the most active bloggers -- andrew sullivan, matthew yglesias, joshua micah marshall and the contributors to the huffington post -- are insistent partisans in political debate. some reject the label "journalist," associating it with what they contemptuously call msm (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of "citizen journalist" dedicated to broader democratization.
he goes on to bemoan the lack of "old fashioned gum-shoe reporting" in the (mis-named) blogosphere, and in fact, his last paragraph wraps up his argument:

the more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. but what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. the word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.
except, michael you didn't even bother to "sift" facts for your own writing. as most of us know, the bloggers mentioned in his third paragraph do not write for free. matt yglesias himself points out that he has a 401(k) for his blogging efforts.

josh marshall took it upon himself to point this out to mr. skube:

so against my better judgment, i sent skube an email telling him that i found it hard to believe he was very familiar with tpm if he was including us as examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere.

now, i get criticized plenty. and that's fair since i do plenty of criticizing. and i wouldn't raise any of this here if it weren't for what came up in skube's response.

not long after i wrote i got a reply: "i didn't put your name into the piece and haven't spent any time on your site. so to that extent i'm happy to give you benefit of the doubt ..."

this seemed more than a little odd since, as i said, he certainly does use me as an example -- along with sullivan, matt yglesias and kos. so i followed up noting my surprise that he didn't seem to remember what he'd written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he'd never read.

to which i got this response: "i said i did not refer to you in the original. your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought i needed to cite more examples ... "

and this is from someone who teaches journalism?

perhaps i'm naive. but it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he's never read.

actually, if you look at what he says, it seems skube's editor at the times oped page didn't think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. or perhaps any examples. so the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and skube signed off. and skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn't know anything about them.

i grant you that the blogosphere needs better bloggers. but, as usual, the need for better critics seems even more acute.
that may be what blogtopia, and yes, we coined that phrase, needs, but what we want is laid out by jill at feministe:

for the most part, progressive bloggers don’t want to see the end of cnn or the new york times or newsweek. we just want you to do your job.
amen.

addendum: jason linkins, who has a named made for blogging, points out over at huffpost that jay rosen finds yet another easily-researched fact that skube gets wrong:

but the boom was lowered most distinctly this morning at pressthink, by the typically astute jay rosen, who after calling skube an "embarrassment" and beseeching him to "retire," points out one last detail (also noted by will bunch) that basically sums it all up:

and when you're done lecturing us on "the patient fact-finding of reporters," tell the godforsaken la times they're going to have to run a correction. the post hasn't won a pulitzer for its reporting on walter reed army medical center. jeez."
that's true! you can look it up! but, in skube's defense, doing so does take an onerous 4.5 seconds.

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posted by skippy at 11:58 AM |

1 Comments:

What, you mean accurately reporting the words of people of power isn't their jobs? You mean they're supposed to, like, actually dig up those fact thingies and tell us what's true or not about what those people of power are saying? But... but... that's not what they were taught to do in journalism school! Journalism school is where all aspiring journalists learn that their job is to, err, operate a tape recorder while attending press conferences by invitation of the rich and/or powerful and accurately transcribe what they recorded. Sheesh, didn't you see Colbert's Washington journalist roast?!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
commented by Blogger BadTux, 3:04 PM PDT  

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