In the New York magazine article mentioned in the posting immediately below, note this intriguing quote: "The Bush administration has masterfully eroded the press's ability to do its job. Partisan bloggers and radio commentators scrutinise every story for evidence of carrying somebody's political water." A couple of things before we consider the real implications. First, it's ridiculous to imagine that President Bush is manipulating the blogosphere. Second, there's an obvious non-sequitor (quite apart from the change of tenses!) between the two sentences: the former suggests that bloggers are working for Bush while the latter says they are asking pertinent questions about everyone's political agenda.
Those matters aside, the second assertion is surely true - and what's wrong with that? That's the great plus of bloggers. Just as mainstream media acts as a watchdog on governments, so bloggers act as watchdogs on the media itself. And they come at that from every possible political position. Bloggers from the left scrutinise the right, and vice versa. Nor is it clear that pro-Bush bloggers are in the ascendancy, though I can see that they are fired up by their inflexible view that, in the States, "mainstream media" equals "liberal media". It shouldn't blind us to the essential truth that we can't get away with much.
Journalists, and I'm no different in this respect of course, have to get used to their work being scrutinised. I have been corrected and criticised, subjected to withering scorn and sarcasm; and along the way I've learned a lot I thought I knew, and clearly didn't. I haven't always agreed and some of the stuff has been unfair but, hopefully, that will make me better informed and also make me more cautious. So why should this process of scrutiny be considered A Bad Thing?
