Heroic Battle Against The Straw Man
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, says bloggers and search engines will not replace professional reporting:
“That may sound like a strange thing to say in the age of too much information.”
He referred to a “media tsunami” of blogs, Google News, RSS feeds, social networking websites like MySpace and online video file-sharing operations such as YouTube.
“The civic labour performed by journalists on the ground cannot be replicated by legions of bloggers sitting hunched over their computer screens,” Keller said.
“It cannot be replaced by a search engine. It cannot be supplanted by shouting heads or satirical television shows. What is absent from the vast array of new media outlets is, first and foremost, the great engine of newsgathering–the people who witness events, ferret out information, supply context and explanation.”
I need a name. Who believes bloggers etc. will replace reporting? Anyone? Anyone who isn’t completely ill-informed? Anyone who isn’t a total crank?
This is the same straw man that Nicholas Lemann bravely stuck down last year. In that column in The New Yorker, Lemann said citizen journalism couldn’t be more than an “addendum” to the professional effort. And my reaction: Sounds good to me!
(Actually, it can be more than an addendum.)
Bloggers and such can play an important role in journalism. Not professional journalism, not citizen journalism, but journalism–a civic-wide effort to give all of us the information we need to be free and self-governing.
