Army of Davids

[prog]

Excerpt from this past week's Gene Weingarten chat:

Alexandria, Va.: "We are heading for a period of indeterminate length where there will be insufficient eyes on our government, on business, and on the powers that be in, in general. Where official pronouncements will be accepted and printed as news. Where the heart-and-soul changing stories of human interest are going to remain unnoticed. I think it's bad, and I think it's going to take a while before we realize what we're missing."

Gene, you are so dead wrong about the effect of use of the Internet -- in fact, citizens are now armed with much more information about government, business and society than ever before. The only difference is that the WaPo, NYT and other major media are no longer the gatekeepers of information and have no monopoly on the questioning of authority. You should buy a copy of "An Army of Davids" and get ready for the new world.

Gene Weingarten: The army of Davids do not have people paid well to cultivate sources over years, people like Dana Priest, who will expose malfeasances via years of training as investigative journalists. With an army of Davids as protectors of the realm, I guarantee you Richard Nixon would have served two terms. Possibly succeeded by President Spiro Agnew.

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Gene Weingarten: I don't mean to overstate this, cause it sounds defensive, but: People who think we will be protected by bloggers really have no idea what they are talking about. David Simon made this point eloquently yesterday on WAMU.

He noted that when he recently broke a story about police malfeasance in Baltimore, he wasn't having to push past all the bloggers working the story.

This particular exchange has stuck in my head for several days. I find it very hard to dismiss, and rather chilling.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

And with an army of newspaper folk protecting us, George W. Bush did in fact serve two terms.

Dana Priest actually is good. Weingarten sometimes is too. There are real concerns here and I'm not sure what the answer is. But the Washington Post in particular fell down on the job a lot over the past eight years, probably because of the whole access-based culture of Washington journalism.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

The onward march of American imperialism has made pretty much all media irrelevant. I've recently realized that Heinlein's "The Logic of Empire" is way more prophetic than seems plausible, although the cheap labour he posited has come from Chinese, Indian and Pakistani slums rather than transported slaves on other planets...

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think it's more that the cultivation of sources in Washington has made the Washington Post increasingly irrelevant. If reporting on Washington is your bread and butter you don't want to piss your sources off and lose access. If they're powerful people, that means you have to do some toadying to powerful people, which is not really where you want to be as an investigative journalist.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

I really have to agree strongly with Gene here. News just doesn't appear out of no where -- it needs a 'source' -- a point of origin that bridges the gap between when an event happens and when that event is presented to the public.

As part of a news story myself I have seen and followed that news and it is remarkable just how many publications 'rely' on someone else's source. Look up any national news story and you can see that same news story repeated over and over 'almost' word for word in many other locations.

It seems Gene is most concerned about the number and quality of those original news sources. Bloggers aren't news sources -- they relay and filter news sources -- some might do a really good job, but they can only use what they're presented with.

[cnoocy]

Bloggers aren't news sources, but news sources can and do blog. I believe we have already seen whistleblowers post anonymously to online sources or contact bloggers. We need a better way to determine the trust value of such sources, but as noted above, traditional reporters haven't actually been doing a great job with that either. In fact, I think the dismissal of online news sources by traditional ones was a big problem with the Bush-era media.

[dariusk.livejournal.com]

I agree -- basically I think that we need trained investigative journalists and that they should be blogging. (The question remains, how do they get paid for this.)

But yes, the David Simon story that Weingarten referred is rather chilling:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022703591.html

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

What we need is a new business model for funding something like a wire service. The physical paper isn't important, but paying someone to investigate and report full-time, in the readers' interest, is.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

The current media outlets have lost one of their most valuable assets: credibility. Without this, reporting and investigation are unimportant: no one believes you did the hard work to find out the truth when you so often just present made-up news you got off YouTube.

Credibility is a marketable commodity, and something that established, high-reputation newspapers built their business on. Along the way they got lapped by low-reputation ad-driven entertainment, and soon everyone thought that it was distribution that was the money-maker. Print whatever you want, as long as people buy it and look at the ads. Now that people won't pay you to hand them big sheets of paper, that market has collapsed.

And I hope that people will return to paying for a combination of accuracy plus timeliness plus presentation, and that somehow this will find a niche in the new free-distribution model of communication, where it is truth elucidation (and not content generation or distribution) that is the expensive part.