All Blog Posts from Public Eye

The other day I kicked the tires of a theory espoused by a freelance journalist from up in Boston. He was suggesting that anybody – whether blogger or “citizen journalist” or YouTube uploader – should be considered a ‘journalist’ if they do something that “genuinely looks like journalism.”

More important than labeling, in the author’s mind, was the thought that these ‘genuine-seeming journalists’ should be afforded the legal protections granted to accredited media members.

Well, not that it should come as too much of a surprise, but old school White House scribe Helen Thomas isn’t drinking that “everybody’s a journalist!” kool-aid.

Read full post…

Elon Professor Micheal Skube skewered bloggers Sunday in an op-ed column published in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Blogs: All The Noise That Fits.” And in doing so, he invoked the name and words of the eminent cultural critic Christopher Lasch to support his thesis. Wrote Skube:

"What democracy requires," Lasch wrote in "The Lost Art of Argument," "is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can only be generated by debate. We do not know what we need until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy.”

There was something appealing about this argument -- one that no blogger would reject -- when Lasch advanced it almost two decades ago. But now we have the opportunity to witness it in practice, thanks to the blogosphere, and the results are less than satisfying. One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.

But they are, more often than not, trademarks of the kind of journalism that makes a difference.

So what Skube is trying to say is that bloggers are cheapening public debate – in the Laschian sense – because they are too opinionated, unrestrained and self-righteous. Now, it’s not as if I’m Will Hunting and Lasch is Vickers’ “Work in Essex County,” but Skube is guilty of a little bit of selective quoting when it comes to Mr. Lasch.

Read full post…

It’s a common complaint from frustrated media consumers: Why don’t journalists just point out the truth? When a politician says something fishy, why don’t they call them on it? The facts are easy enough to track down, after all. So why won’t Mr. Talking Head just use ‘em?

Perhaps because the “facts” aren’t always as straightforward as we’d like to think. Consider John Neffinger’s criticism of MSNBC’s David Shuster and his fact checking of last night’s debate. One of Neffinger’s examples: After Hillary Clinton said she would "put somebody in charge who actually cared about the people of New Orleans" – making a clear implication about the present administration – Shuster said that "To say that the Bush administration doesn't care about New Orleans - that's a leap."

Neffinger also notes that Shuster went after Joe Biden for taking about “how much [Bush] has ruined” the country. Shuster cited the dictionary definition of "ruin" as causing "irreparable damage" and said Biden’s comments were "a bit of a stretch."

Read full post…