Joe Gandelman has an interesting post today on the evolving voice of the Blogosphere, triggered by the recent coverage of Jill Carroll's kidnapping and release:
"Scalp hunting has become the national pastime of blogs. Both lefty and righty lodgepoles have some pretty impressive trophies hanging on them; Dan Rather, Mary Mapes (twice), Eason Jordon, Trent Lott, Ben Domenech, to name a few more noteworthy ones.
But is this what we are? Is this what we are becoming? Are we nothing more than a pack of digital yellow journalists writing pixelated scab sheets vying to see who we can lay low next? If this be the way to fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I truly fear that, like television, the last great technological breakthrough that promised to change the world, we will degenerate into a mindless, bottomless pit of muck and mudslinging, dragging down the culture and trivializing even the most important issues."More from the post:
"Weblogs are an incredible opportunity. Today, anyone can now become a journalist, an investigative reporter, and editor and a publisher. They don't have to navigate themselves through corporate and office politics to become a commentator. They don't have to kowtow to a corporation to get their info and views published. All it takes is a computer and a blogsite. {...}
Despite the incredibible journalistic and informational potential of blogs, weblogs in the early 21st Century have evolved into extended op-ed pages, with occasional smatterings of original reporting and research. There's nothing wrong with that.
But blogs have also emerged as a kind of cyberspace talk radio where judgments are faster than traditional "snap" judgments, supposition is angrily expressed as utter certainty, demonization is the rule, and some sites are so fixed on promoting personal political agendas and world views that they lose sight of the value of a bit of restraint before politically pigeonholing someone. {...}
In people’s haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us – including myself – have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland. {...}
Do blogs want to be news analyzers? Opinion shapers? Political influencers? Or do they want to become like the very worst extreme left and extreme right talk show hosts? If the choice is the latter, then why shouldn't the news media view blogs as a written by a bunch of hyperactive political activists who want to get their harsh opinions out there first no matter what so they attract attention to themselves?"
Are blogs inevitably going to embody the baser part of our political dialogue, the part that was filtered out and managed by the "professional" press over the past several decades? I sincrrely hope that this vituperative stage of the blogosphere has more to do with adolescence and less to do with the fundamental, structural weaknesses of the medium.