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January 03, 2006
Kathleen Parker, Please Call Michelle Malkin
Just before I left last week I noticed Kathleen Parker's baffling diatribe against the blogosphere. It's baffling because as a columnist featured at Townhall.com she has done excellent work: in this piece she exposes some outrageous changes to the military's Standing Rules of Engagement; and here she reports on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that agrees that a school district has a right to question seven-year-olds about their sex life.
But when it comes to blogs, Kathleen loses her objectivity and descends into paranoid ranting not far removed from that of Mary Mapes. From her December 28th column (Thanks to Pam at Blogmeister USA for the reminder. All emphases in bold are mine):
What is wonderful and miraculous about the Internet needs little elaboration. We all marvel at the ease with which we can access information - whether reading government documents previously available only to a few, or tracking down old friends and new enemies.
It is this latter - our new enemies - that interests me most. I don't mean al-Qaida or Osama bin Laden, but the less visible, insidious enemies of decency, humanity and civility - the angry offspring of narcissism's quickie marriage to instant gratification.
There's something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the Blogosphere - the big-bang "electroniverse" where recently wired squatters set up new camps each day.
So Parker thinks "our new enemies", i.e. the bloggers, are waging their own war against "decency, humanity and civility"? Since when do these trump accuracy, accountability and political disinterestedness as the most valuable traits for a journalist to strive for? Indeed, in a later paragraph Parker lets loose another whopper that doesn't have much to do with humanity or civility:
Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its own members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.
Parker's departure here from her usual clear headed thinking is so dramatic that it makes one wonder if she's not under some real stress over her own job. As she herself points out, she has "written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new 'citizen journalist,'" but most of the time it's been faint praise of the "yes, but..." variety. Parker did, however, write with obvious appreciation of the bloggers' work on the Rathergate scandal:
The implication that bloggers are slacker dust bunnies has delighted bloggers, the best of whom are lawyers, professors, scientists, renegade journalists and techies of various sorts [...]
All of which brings me to my premise that the blogosphere isn't just a challenge to journalism in its currently stagnant state, but a potential boon to problem-solving of a higher order. The beauty of the blogosphere is that it is self-igniting, self-propelling and self-selecting, a sort of intellectual ecosystem wherein the best specimens from various disciplines descend from the ethers, converge on an issue and apply their unique talents
And even though she's borrowing N.Z. Bear's ubiquitous biological terminology, Parker shows here that she understands the unique design triangle that makes the blogosphere so effective: self-correction; deep and varied pool of expertise; and accessibility to everyone. She concludes in an almost giddy tone:
It seems, therefore, not unreasonable to hope that as this new galaxy expands - with the best and brightest emerging as natural evolution commands - bloggers might apply their immense energy and collective intellect to solving an array of human problems.
She was spot-on in September 2004, but since then she's lost it. From a column dated January 12, 2005:
[Bloggers] are a formidable and welcome force, but as non-journalists in the institutional sense, they're accountable to no one. Therein shines the little light we can find among these dark tales of the fallen.
For all their flaws, mainstream (institutional) journalists are accountable where others are not. When they mess up, consequences are real and ruthless, as Williams and the CBS folks can attest. That much consumers can rely upon.
Is she kidding me? These words could have come straight out of Joel Klein's mouth. CBS has skated, for the most part, especially when you consider the magnitude of their offense. And what does Parker have to say about the ongoing campaign of the MSM--notably the New York Times and Washington Post--to leak classified US strategies to fight the GWOT; or the constant and documented negative spin that colors MSM reporting of the war on Iraq? Parker's claim that consumers can trust MSM accountability is ludicrous on its face.
She continues to miss the point in November 2005:
As much as we've heard about the slow death of newspapers - "mainstream media," as disaffected bloggers like to call us - we've heard little about why this is no cause for celebration. A so-called "victory" for the blogosphere vis-a-vis declining newspaper readership is very much a defeat for the freedoms we take for granted.
Newspapers serve their communities in ways that can't be replicated by bloggers - noble-spirited, smart and entertaining as many often are - or by anyone else. They not only help define a given community, but also serve as both government watchdog and information conduit. They have the resources to investigate, to report, to inform as no other entity can, does or will.
The first job of a newspaper is not to "define a community". Here Parker seems to be channeling the same logic of the "self esteem" movement that afflicts our public school curriculums: just as real academic achievement is the necessary ingredient of self esteem in students, accuracy and accountability are the true ingredients for readers' loyalty. And it's only from that soundly established loyalty that the warm and fuzzy by-products (like defining a community) flow.
By this point it's clear that Parker is worried about losing her job--and the fact that "untrained" and unpaid citizen journalists are a driving force behind the increasing irrelevancy of newspapers is sending her into irrationality. She concludes here latest column with an ill-advised analogy between bloggers and the anarchical children in William Golding's Lord of the Flies.
What Golding demonstrated - and what we're witnessing as the Blogosphere's offspring multiply - is that people tend to abuse power when it is unearned and will bring down others to enhance themselves. Likewise, many bloggers seek the destruction of others for their own self-aggrandizement. When a mainstream journalist stumbles, they pile on like so many savages, hoisting his or her head on a bloody stick as Golding's children did the fly-covered head of a butchered sow.
Unearned power? This is the definition of vacuous elitism, and it's exactly the same attitude adopted ad nauseum by our Leftist academics and teachers' union members. And the charge that bloggers are out to destroy others for fun is merely a rehashing of Mary Mapes' farcical complaints. John Hawkins at Right Wing News gets it exactly right:
In my opinion, it's because we're the antithesis of everything they've ever done. Most of us didn't go to journalism school. We didn't work our way up the ladder by doing crap assignments at small papers. We've never had a high opinion of the "legends" of the business like Cronkite, Rather, Jennings or for that matter, of the business as a whole. We don't think journalists have a "near-pathological allegiance to getting it right." To the contrary, we think that many of the biggest and most prestigious old media organizations are sloppy with the facts and often mislead their readers because of ideological bias and we delight in pointing that out at every opportunity.
Mainstream journalists have a decision to make: embrace the new media and make it your own, or become bitter and irrelevant. I hope Kathleen Parker starts a blog and resumes her good work.
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Comments
I enjoyed your analysis. It is simply astounding to me that "news reporters" don't even feel the need to do basic research to support their writing for this type of story about blogs and the news (or apparently many other stories). I've been writing about this over at my blog...if you look at the numbers, the blogosphere is already "mainstream." The regular news media just doesn't bother to do their homework anymore.
Posted by: jan at January 4, 2006 12:42 AM
What's funny is that Parker (and a lot of others) rails about blogs getting more attention than they deserve, while really the opposite is true: there tons of 100-visit-a-day blogs that are astounding in their quality.
Posted by: Jeff at January 4, 2006 01:26 AM
