Here's What's Left: Navel-gazing: now with added rigor!

A lot of people have justly ridiculed Adam Cohen's poorly thought-out and nearly incoherent column in Sunday's NYTimes about ethics in blogging. I do want to address Cohen's attempt at seriousness though, because this may be a not unimportant topic, and Cohen shouldn't get the last argumentative word on something he clearly doesn't understand. Should there be some sort of ethics of blogging? I personally think so, but Cohen has the wrong idea:

Every mainstream news organization has its own sets of ethics rules, but all of them agree broadly on what constitutes ethical journalism. Information should be verified before it is printed, and people who are involved in a story should be given a chance to air their viewpoints, especially if they are under attack. Reporters should avoid conflicts of interest, even significant appearances of conflicts, and disclose any significant ones. Often, a conflict means being disqualified to cover a story or a subject. When errors are discovered or pointed out by internal or external sources, they must be corrected. And there should be a clear wall between editorial content and advertising.[...]

But Mr. Rather's and Mr. Jordan's misdeeds would most likely not have landed them in trouble in the world of bloggers, where few rules apply. Many bloggers make little effort to check their information, and think nothing of posting a personal attack without calling the target first - or calling the target at all. They rarely have procedures for running a correction. The wall between their editorial content and advertising is often nonexistent.[...] And bloggers rarely disclose whether they are receiving money from the people or causes they write about.

As far as I can tell, Cohen is pointing out three basic things that are deficient in blogging:

1) Blogs aren't good at fact checking.
2) They don't issue corrections when they're wrong.
3) They can be remiss in acknowledging conflicts of interest.

None of these points are particularly untrue. But they're also not very interesting, and they don't address either the real problems or real benefits of having bloggers around. Let's do each of them in turn:

1) Blogs, for the most part, aren't good at fact checking. But this isn't necessarily a problem in and of itself. Most of us aren't trying to be journalists, and most of our readers don't expect us to be journalists. There are very fewer bloggers who would consider themselves serious journalists. Someone like Josh Marshall, perhaps, but anyone that reads his site regularly knows that he's obsessive about up-to-the-minute accuracy (who's just said what about Social Security, etc. -- and he never touches the inflamatory stuff; if he did get something really wrong, it wouldn't be such a big deal). But most bloggers, myself included, see themselves as commentators, not journalizers. Jesse, writing at Ezra's, agrees:

I'm not a journalist. I frequently do research to argue a point, and include it, but my job is not to report, and I don't want that to be my job. I do believe that bloggers should be honest, but I also have to note that bloggers are not nearly as monolithic as the national media - we have no problem savaging each other.

Occasionally, a blogger will be the cause of a national media story, a la Rather, Jordan, Gannon. (And given how many billions of words are written by countless bloggers every day, it's kind of suprising that they make such a little impact.) But mostly, blogging amounts to several tropes that we all recognize: 'can you believe person x said thing y,' "can you believe political party x did thing y," "here's what we should do about political party x doing thing y," "here's an interesting issue that you should be paying attention to," etc.

All of those tropes and their close relatives, which make up 95% of the blogosphere, rely on the media (both mainstream and not) for their cannon fodder, and if they're sloppy, bloggers, for the most part, will be too.

2) It's not quite correct to say that bloggers don't issue corrections when they're wrong. Some do; some don't. Assuming that bloggers are for the most part partisan, the problem is that some bloggers care about telling the truth, while other ones have a truly reckless disregard for it. On the my side, someone like Atrios is about as partisan a lefty as you can get, but he'll correct himself when he gets something obviously wrong and it's pointed out to him. On the right, you have people like Powerline, who, no matter how much evidence you show them, will not issue a correction. (Readers of this site will know that we've sure tried.) The problem is not with blogging itself; it's with individuals and their standards of truth.

Does that mean bloggers should issue corrections? Absolutely. Does it mean that there should be some sort of agreed upon ethical system? Possibly. Does that mean that a columnist in the NYTimes should make blanket generalizations about blogging without citing any evidence or thinking through his ideas? I think not.

If we're going to worry so much about people with opinions being accurate, it'd be great if Mr. Cohen would direct his critique at people that have influence, and who make their money as opinion peddlers. Someone like Ann Coulter, who can't get a fact right to save her life, and who does not, to my knowledge, issue corrections. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Would it be facetious of me to suggest that Cohen seems to be guilty of precisely kinds of infractions he's accusing bloggers of?

3) Bloggers should be very careful about disclosure and conflicts of interest. No disagreement there. Again, though, this is not a widespread problem, and if I may, I'd like to gently suggest that it's mostly on the right that problems with disclosure occur. The two bloggers on the Thune campaign's payroll didn't disclose anything. And the attempts to make Kos, because his disclaimer wasn't big enough, into an equivalent were ridiculous at best and deeply dishonest at worst (here's Instapundit essentially agreeing).

As you can probably see by now, a large portion of Cohen's wrongheaded critique rests upon a sloppy equivalence between the mainstream media and bloggers. It doesn't really make sense to hold bloggers to the the same kind of standards as the mainstream media, if, in fact, they're different kinds of creatures. It's hard to take Cohen serious when he suggests that there's something wrong with the fact that many bloggers "think nothing of posting a personal attack without calling the target first - or calling the target at all." I wonder what Bill O'Reilly's secretary would tell me if I asked her to comment on the fact that I was about to write that her boss is a lying scumbag?

All of this is not to say that there aren't serious problems with the blogosphere. There are. The fact that a group of serial liars like those who run Powerline can become prominent in such a community is Exhibit A. But one of the problems is also certainly that the mainstream media doesn't really understand blogs at all -- and if they don't understand them, they can't cover them properly.

Kind of a funny irony there, huh? That a problem with the perception of the role in of blogs in political discourse is the fact that the mainstream media can't quite get their facts straight about blogs. That almost sounds like the subject of a blog entry.

Comments

Cohen holds bloggers to a higher standard than professional journalists. "...people who are involved in a story should be given a chance to air their viewpoints..." recalls the Fairness Doctrine, a public policy dumped during the Reagan Revolution (check out j a c k *'s thoughts on that).

Meanwhile, even wanna-be decent newspapers litter the editorial pages with national propagandists. Those guys don't fact check or air opposing viewpoints. This is justified "it is just an opinion".

It seems to me that the pros should be held to standards before stretching them to the rest of us!

Posted by: Ma'at's Feather | May 09, 2005 at 11:02 AM