My First Fisking!

MSM smear jobs against the blogosphere are a dime a dozen, and fiskings of them are about $0.11 a dozen. I thought carefully before choosing to fisk the Florida Times-Union's pathetic hatchet job against bloggers, because it almost seemed too easy, but I suppose as a Jacksonville blogger, I should clean up my own geographic corner of the MSM.

Let's start, shall we?

A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project reveals that Internet blog readership has increased dramatically in the past year.

Twenty-seven percent of Internet users are reading blogs, according to the report, re- presenting a whopping 58 percent increase from 2003. Just 62 percent of surveyed Internet users said they don't know exactly what a blog is.

Those numbers raise an eyebrow. Trends that increase by 58 percent in one year are not to be ignored.

I tracked down this Pew study here. It's a pity that the online Times-Union didn't bother to link to it. Journalists, pay attention. In the blogosphere, we call this 'evidence'.

Blogs, for the uninitiated, are Web logs, essentially forms of Internet diaries that range from the day-to-day journals of average lonely hearts to the political rantings and ravings of hotheads and those who interact with them on their blog sites.

There are definately many journals of lonely hearts and political rantings and ravings from hotheads. But the Times-Union presents this as the entire range. Does the blogosphere not include such lofty figures as law professors, inumerable college professors, and even a host of journalists?

They differ from old-fashioned Web sites in that they disseminate information quickly and without oversight. Some of them masquerade as established think tanks.

And do not prominent news organizations, such as CNN and FoxNews rush out stories onto the Internet? And precisely which blogs 'masquerade as established think tanks'? Care to name a few, or better, link to a few?

As for lack of oversight, there are thousands of readers who fact-check their favorite bloggers, and bloggers also fact check each other. Here are a few posts of prominent bloggers retracting posts when they have been corrected.

Thus, there is a lot of strange information out there in blog-land. It is a universe still occupied by the relatively young and male user, although that will no doubt change as the medium becomes more familiar.

There are no rules in blog-land. There is no code of ethics or signing of oaths before one becomes an official blogger. Just sign up and start ranting.

Apparently there are no standards of ethics in 'professional' journalism, either. Just use poorly forged National Guard documents to push a story, or accuse US soldiers of assassinating journalists without any basis in fact. As with all information sources, MSM or blogosphere, caveat emptor.

The information found on political or consumer-related blogs can be subsidized by an unseen sponsor. Blogs can look as though they were created by Joe Blow, when they're actually a guerrilla marketing tool of Joe Giant Conglomerate Inc.

Who? Do you have any evidence of bloggers being run by unseen sponsors? Name names.

As anyone who has tried to do family genealogy research on the Web knows, there is a lot of bad information out there. The only rules in Webville are those governing http, html and other computer coding protocols. No one rules taste or truth.

There is one rule: "We'll fact check your %&*!" If a blogger makes baseless accusations, as you have done, a swarm of other bloggers will call him on it. And he'd better act quickly, or his reputation will sink, and so will his traffic.

And while we're on the topic, what precisely, prevents the Times-Union from printing false or misleading information? What makes the Times-Union a more reliable source of information, than, say, Instapundit or Little Green Footballs, if it can't or won't link to its sources directly? Any information institution which uses 'anonymous sources' on a regular basis has no basis to complain.

We'll never see effective laws governing what people post in cyberspace. That's never going to happen in the First Amendment country we live in and has been tough to implement even in a totalitarian place like China where, according Radio Free Asia, Chinese Web police are not suppressing political debate or dissent.

Well, don't loose hope. The FEC is working on it, on your behalf.

Even attempts to cajole bloggers into adopting journalistic principles of accountability and fairness are toothless. Bloggers can't be fired. By nature, these independent roamers of cyberspace are never going to be corralled into a rule- or ethics- based system. They're no more controllable than the friendly debate between barflies sharing a pitcher of beer.

Blog readers will corral irresponsible bloggers. If a blogger is exposed for being dishonest, the whole blogosphere will know promptly, which is quite different from the way the MSM rallied around CBS's forged documents, or protected Eason Jordan from his lies for weeks.

"Buyer beware" is the only code that will ever rule the land of blog.

The Internet is a fast river of information, both good and bad. Blogs will always tend to fall into the latter category.

As I said, the information purveyor should beware of all sources, whether it's The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal fabricating hit pieces out of whole cloth, the MSM distorting the news to sway elections, or deliberately endangering the lives of Iraqi bloggers.

The media is a fast river of information, both good and bad. Hack reporters scared that they will now be routinely exposed as liars tend to fall into the latter category.