So I’m an obsessed user of Google Blog Search, both for work and during my free time. It looks like I just got yet another reason to check it out often; it appears to be aggregating blog posts much in the same way that Google News aggregates articles on its front page.
The latest MSM scandal imagined up by the clown car known as the right wing blogosphere is that PBS anchor Gwen Ifill, who is scheduled to moderate the VP debates, has a conflict of interest because … wait for it … she has written a book that gave her access to Obama.
Let’s think about this. What is a non-fiction book? It’s basically a longer version of a magazine feature article. If Ifill had written a cover story for, say, TIME magazine, that involved her having access to Obama, is that a conflict of interest? No, because that’s what a journalist does, he or she writes nonfiction.
Most of the blathering of that side of the blogosphere about mainstream journalists comes as a direct result of them not knowing what journalism is.
A headline from The Politico: In reintroduction, Palin to do more interviews and “tell her story”
How the headline should read: “Palin to receive free unfettered advertising from right wing radio ideologues.”
Digg is so in love with a core set of sites that it would rather link to a Huffington Post piece that links to a Washington Post piece rather than just linking directly to the Post. Web evangelists like Jeff Jarvis talk about the power of the link, but something I’ve noticed again and again is that websites try to water down their links in order to get maximum traffic to posts that are basically regurgitations of other people’s work.
UPDATE; Yet another front page story linking to a Huffington Post article that merely blockquotes an AP excerpt.
While Republicans and Democrats engage in their own heated version of the Blame Game for who’s actually responsible for the current financial crisis, the business press has been standing in the corner, hands in pockets, avoiding eye contact. So the question is: what role did they play in not warning us of the coming disaster?
The Columbia Journalism Review:
Your beat just blew up.
From a journalistic standpoint, what we are experiencing today is the equivalent of the city hall reporter arriving for work one day to find the mayor and city council being led out in handcuffs. If the business press were, say, a nuclear industry reporter, this is having most of the reactors on your beat melting down to China. What to tell the boss?
In my opinion, the business press covers the financial industry in the same way the political press covers politics: As a horse race. They couldn’t see the coming storm because they were too fixated on how far the stock market had risen or fallen on that particular day. It was certainly surreal to listen to them months ago declaring that the world was ending one day and then act like everything was fine when the market experienced a brief bounce the next day.
Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.
simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
