The "Fifth Estate" Strikes Back

With his criticism of "citizen journalism" last week, Bertrand Pecquerie drew some response in the blogosphere from two people he named in his "Outside Voices" post. Jeff Jarvis was first out of the gate, taking note of Pecquerie's assertion that 9/11 resulted in some collective form of "media nationalism." Here's Jarvis:

Go ahead and roll that fine French whine around on the palate and pick up the nuance. Taint of vinegar, eh? Pecquerie can't stand anything that isn't critical of Bush; that's what this is about. But he also despises the democratization of the press.

In both cases, representatives of the traditional Fourth Estate are doubting the usefulness of the Fifth Estate of bloggers and others who don't fit into the neat boundaries of the professional class of journalists. In both cases, they raise interesting questions that devolve into straw-men attacks.

Bertrand's equation above — more blogging=less democracy — is laughably spurious. I mean, the old East Germany had 99.999 percent turnout and not an ounce of officially permitted independent thinking: Now there was a democracy, right?

Professional journalism does not gain credibility by casting stones at the bottom-up media, which definitely can use some improvement as it veers into journalism but is not trying — at least not in my view of things — to replace the traditional media.