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Journalism as democracy

2 comments on Journalism as democracy

Journalism as democracy
: Howard Rheingold writes in OJR about the power of online — weblogs, moblogs, et al — in re journalism and democracy, making the point I was trying to make about the interest in the Iran story on weblogs vs. the coverage of it in media:

Journalism, if it is to deserve the name, is not about the quality of the camera, but about the journalist’s intuition, integrity, courage, inquisitiveness, analytic and expressive capabilities, and above all, the trust the journalist has earned among readers.

Good journalists discern compelling stories in events, cultivate and mobilize networks of sources, double check and triple check facts, develop reputations that can only be won by getting the story right week after week, year after year….

Now, by subscribing and linking to online sources we trust, the consumers of blog content are becoming a kind of collective editorial system. The more attentively we sift and analyze and share our discoveries online, the more the writers of blogs (and whatever blogs evolve into) can grow a social intelligence….

For all its entertainment and social networking value, the most important promise of blogging is that it could help revivify the moribund public sphere that is as essential to democracy as voting. The petitions, letters to the editor, pamphleteering that preceded the American and French revolutions were essential enabling institutions for the experiments in self-government that followed….

Thus, the collective brain of the blogosphere edits the news (and fact-checks it) and brings not only stories but also causes of interest to the surface (see Iran). [via Cyberwriter]

2 responses to “Journalism as democracy”

  1. Eye Opener Avatar
    Eye Opener

    I LOVE IT!
    When I served in uniform, I had a Top-Secret Crypto clearance and served on a mountain-top just south of the North Korean border…
    Our Commo van had several teletype machines going all the time, and one often had UPI coming in, and another AP or Reuters… I learned young how UPI would write B-A-E-C-D, and AP would start with the A paragraph, but then C-D-B-E, while Reuters would run its twist B-C-D-E(a).
    We’d while away idle hours comparing supposedly identical events being reported in such manifestly different ways that it was difficult to reconcile them at times.
    NOW, however, the Internet and years of schooling and years of experience at being (no, not lied to, but…) misled, has honed the denizens of the Blogosphere to a sharp-edged reality-reporting construct, and I LOVE IT!
    The CNN debacle, (Iraqi childrens’) blood for ‘news’ fiasco stained them and discredited them so badly I really don’t care if I EVER watch CNN again. The now have to EARN credibility!

  2. Thomas Avatar
    Thomas

    My only complaint, as someone who read Smart Mobs and likes alot of Rheingold’s ideas, is that he starts with “The moblogging conference is evidence that the culture of street bloggers I anticipated has sprouted in the real world” but it’s alittle intellectually dishonest. A lot of the participants were people who have been students of Rheingold. So it seemed to me he wrote a book which his students read liked the ideas and said hey let’s talk about these ideas and see how they far and he claims credit for predicting it. I think the causality is alittle faulty. Otherwise it’s a nice piece