Blaming the Bloggers

The Oakland Tribune, my daily newspaper, has a quixotic tendency (given its reader demographic) to publish several syndicated conservative columnists who annoy the hell out of me. One of these is Kathleen Parker, who writes for the Orlando Sentinel. In a recent column entitled "Lord of the Blogs," she brands bloggers "the less visible, insidious enemies of decency, humanity and civility — the angry offspring of narcissism's quickie marriage to instant gratification." Wow. Little did I know what damage I was doing by joining Parker's "frankly creepy" blogosphere.

Having just exited a 15-year stint toiling at the bottom rung of journalism, the trade press (OK, celebrity tabloids would be the bottom rung, making business-to-business press the middle rung), I object when journalism watchdogs attack citizens for writing and reporting outside of established media channels. In fact, I once angrily contradicted UCLA journalism professor Adam Clayton Powell when I sat on a panel with him at a conference. He claimed that digital cameras and laptops were a danger in the hands of the untrained and threatened to derail journalistic integrity. I replied that this pressure from public and private interests forces mainstream media to work even harder--and that's a good thing.

The problem is clear: What remains of the print press--which is the only true news reporting we can rely on, television and magazines being far too tainted by advertising and entertainment--is struggling to retain readerships, and these journalists are frightened by the power of individuals on the Internet to amass audiences that often exceed theirs. The answer is not to condemn the bloggers; the answer is to join them.

"That a Jayson Blair of The New York Times or a Jack Kelley of USA Today surfaces now and then as a plagiarist or a fabricator ultimately is testament to the high standards tens of thousands of others strive to uphold each day without recognition. Blair and Kelley are infamous, but they're also gone," writes Parker. I agree that those cases have been overblown, and that no one should rely on bloggers to police themselves the way the Columbia Journalism Review would like them to.

But Parker also misses a crucial technical point about blogging, one that my former colleague and fellow iconoclast Larry O'Brien describes in his very popular blog, www.knowing.net: "...blogging games the search engines which, in turn, are now the de facto first step in finding 'experts' to hire. ...That's money in the bank, my friends. Honestly, being the #1 Google return for 'programming Sabre' has directly earned me more money than I have made in 15 years of writing for magazines and speaking at conferences."

Blogs are primarily a promotional tool. Sensationalism (I assume) wins eyeballs for some of these people--just as it does for television news, magazines and many newspapers. I agree that there's lots of junk out there (including blog spam), and I read very few blogs myself. But the voice of the people can and will and should be heard. This is what's great about the Internet. Parker never names who her targets are (probably not wanting to generate even more traffic for them). She should stop blaming the medium for its messengers.

Meanwhile, I'm so glad Parker is a member of the legitimate press, trained to use hyperbole and invective only for the greater good. If she weren't, I might be concerned that she's lost her grip on reality when she equates bloggers with a few notorious Islamic terrorists. I mean, if that were written in some random blog on the Web rather than by a syndicated columnist, I'd really say they'd gone too far.

(Here's a link to Larry's blog--the entry was dated December 30, 2005. In Safari for some reason I'm having trouble editing this blog. Ironic, I know. )