Wake up, there is no difference!
The journalists have marginalized themselves. Not all of them, but a whole lot of them have decided ratings and audience is more important than the facts and issues at hand. Sorry, but that's entertainment folks, not real news and it's not the bloggers fault either. To be fair, there are good people in all media, working hard to deliver factual news we can use, but their numbers and influence is on the decline in the traditional venues.
We don't really know what a journalist means anymore.
My own experience with non Internet media has grown increasingly stale where hard facts and reporting are concerned. I am often entertained, but I'm also more frequently left seeking the truth as well. I'm not sure this was always true, but it's very true today and growing worse.
Interestingly, I see a number of former journalists have seen great success in talk radio, yet they often cling to their journalistic roots to support their opinion without really having to be journalists. The same can be said for many of the talking heads on the television and the many column writers in our magazines and papers of record. This is a trend that does not appear to be on the decline.
The cold reality is the majority of our journalists today are not acting any differently that a lot of our more popular bloggers are. Why then do we continue to treat them differently?
What's the solution then? Who do we label a journalist? How can we know who to trust? Surely we can't all be journalists, that would make the trust issues very difficult. Hello! They already are, because this is exactly what has happened because we have the Internet today. We do live in interesting times indeed.
Once we understand just what the Internet has given us, the solution to the problem of journalistic protections becomes obvious:
if you want your published work to be protected, as a journalistic work, then you have to act like a journalist when doing said work!
There it is, nice and simple. We know what good journalists have to do, because we spent years developing them in order to take best advantage of our limited ability to publish. Since any of us may publish today, and a growing number of us clearly do, we need to all learn what makes journalism and what makes entertainment, if we are to understand who is entitled to what protections and why.
That does leave our editors in a nasty pickle however. If we all can publish, we really don't need anybody deciding who and what gets published. Our existing law and the beauty of peer review take care of that.
Want to be a trusted source of news? Feel you deserve the time honored protections our law provides? Again, act like you deserve them. Do the right things for the right reasons. Clearly differentiate your opinion from your facts in ways ordinary people, who are your peers, can understand and benefit from. In that way, the public interest is still served and our law would again provide the incentive to make it happen as it should.
I can see it now. Gasps of horror, shock and awe over having to actually think a little as responsible citizens. The magic and power of the Internet is coupled with a cruel lesson long denied us, namely: the ability to publish is no longer the endorsement of trust and integrity it once was.
That's going to be tough for a lot of folks. Having years of established notions of trustworthiness shattered by the Internet is not going to happen without some serious discussion, which is what this essay is all about really. As a people we are again reminded that we ourselves are responsible for finding truth and making our own decisions based on that truth and living with the consequences.
A growing number of Americans are not pleased with how our own government is handling things. Is is any wonder we are here when our notions of trust are based on a publishing model no longer relevant?
Think about it: If you place your trust in a single source, or perhaps a few closely related sources, you are really handing the tough task of truth to those you choose to trust. That means your decisions will be affected as well. What you think you know is really more about who you heard it from, than how truthful is might be, yet you must live with the result. Does that make any real sense at all?
Couple that with the increasing media consolidation we see today and it adds up to a dangerous situation where large numbers of people are trusting more or less single sources. Where this occurs, corruption breeds. It's just who we are. Only a hand full of people call the shots on the majority of our traditional media today. These same folks are currently buying up popular Internet media properties as quickly as they can so they can extend their existing power and influence to the greater Internet.
It so happens the Internet is different than TV, Radio or the published papers however. All of them are a closed club of sorts in that there are only so many presses and broadcast stations. Buy them all and you get control not well checked by contradictory opinion because there is no venue left for that.
Remember, one source, one voice equals power and influence. This all equals dollars and control -lots of it. Again, is it any wonder people are acting out today, given the high level of control we are experiencing?
It's not possible to buy everybody on the Internet. The result is more voices that check the stronger ones and force accountability and empower us to trust and learn truth. So why buy the Internet properties then, when we all can still publish?
It's all about the label. If we continue to grant the label of journalist our implied trust, we also permit laws to be made that dictate who can publish and who cannot. Of course the well established Internet properties will be funded by well established media companies, who are better off with a closed club, not an open one. That's where this is headed and it's why the question of trust is not directly on the table, but carefully swept aside as to preserve the status quo; namely journalist equals trust. This is a false assumption today for reasons that should now be obvious.
If we answer the question of bloggers as journalists, we hurt ourselves in the longer term because it will always be possible for powerful people to decide who gets the label and thus the permission to "publish" with "trust" and "protection."
Learning to understand who to trust is hard. But I say living with the way things are going now is a lot harder and I'm frankly afraid to even discuss the future while we continue to have this basic problem. This will all continue as long as we allow ourselves to be told who to trust.
I'm no longer willing to allow that as I now understand it does me more harm than it does good. We need the bloggers speech, just as we need our own. It's our right as Americans. It's a right we should hold in the very highest regard as it puts our future in our own hands. Without this right, America as we know it is lost.
