I've been mulling last night's Beat the Press story about our being tossed out of the NECN debate. And one of the things that continues to puzzle me is the attitude of Phil Balboni, the president of NECN. Here's what he had to say:
Bloggers are not journalists. Not in my definition. You know, the objectivity, the accuracy, the completeness, the balance, and so on and so forth. A story has to have integrity. Bloggers have -- they may or may not wish to subscribe to those standards.
Actually, you should watch the video, because it tells you more than the transcript.
Notice how, right after Balboni talks about "integrity," he shakes his head and starts to say "bloggers have ...," and then he catches himself and makes a slightly different point. One is tempted to think that he was about to say "bloggers have no integrity," or "no standards," or something along those lines, but he thought better of it. Often, more is revealed by what is not said.
Furthermore, Balboni's position raises far more questions than it answers -- the very questions, in fact, that were raised by Dan Kennedy and Joe Sciacca in the discussion immediately afterward. The most obvious of them is this: what do you do about opinion columnists? They're not "objective." They're not "balanced." They're not even "complete" -- they talk about the part of the story that interests them, in order to make the point they want to make. Yet I find it hard to believe that Mr. Balboni would tell Joan Vennochi, Scot Lehigh, Paul Krugman, and the rest of the punditocracy that they're not "journalists" who merit a seat at NECN's table.
And as for "accuracy": I'm sorry, but I'll stack up our sourcing on factual matters against anyone's. Almost without exception, when we make a factual statement that is not self-evidently true, we supply a link to a credible source. If someone disputes a post's accuracy and can persuade us that we got it wrong, we correct the post. If someone can show our source to be inaccurate, we'll fix that too. We've taken user posts off the site when we thought they made unverified factual assertions. Honestly, I don't know what more we could do as far as "the facts" are concerned. Like everyone else in the media biz, bloggers can lose credibility overnight if they screw up on the facts, so we try hard to avoid doing so.
So, sure, some bloggers "may not wish to subscribe" to the general standard of writing accurate stories. But we do wish to subscribe to that standard, and I frankly think we do a decent job of it. I would have thought that the cartoonish stereotype of pajamas-clad bloggers tapping away at their keyboards in their parents' basements, ranting about whatever pops into their heads without bothering to check on the truth of what they're saying, would have given way by now. But that seems to me to be what Balboni was reacting to.
Of course, we cordially invite Mr. Balboni to expand upon and clarify his views here. The questions of whether and how bloggers fit into the existing "journalism" paradigms, and the extent to which blogging in particular and the internet in general should result in the modification of those paradigms, are interesting ones that can only benefit from further discussion.
