prog | Army of Davids

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.

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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.

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

Army of Davids

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