Conscientious Redux

A man who unearthed 20,000 dead soldiers so far (unfortunately only in German, but the images speak for themselves)

via

Here is why I love blogs: Only bloggers will approach a problem this way. This might in part be because blogs is mostly where those people write who do not already have cushy, established job and who are used to the way things are currently being done and have “always” been done.

You can see this effect most clearly in the area of politics, where blogs have already achieved a status that they don’t (yet) have in the art world. For a long time, the mainstream media used to belittle and/or ignore blogs like TPM - until they couldn’t do it any longer.

Of course, while this might seem as if it was really only a power game - and in part it is - if you have followed TPM you know that they are doing a lot of great work, and, as it turns out, in terms of journalistic practice, they are actually giving those established newspapers a run for the money.

Mind you, this has nothing to do with the blog being superior to a newspaper per se. That would be a bullshit argument. Blogs can be superior to newspaper if (and only if) the makers behind those blogs do a better job than newspapers.

Also, I think what makes blogs so attractive (this is my own perspective, which is based on me reading and following blogs) is that you know who is behind them. There is a lot of talk in the mainstream media how blogs supposedly are less professional, and it’s just opinions anyway.

Here’s the thing, first of all, newspapers are in no position to complain about this, given all the recent scandals about their work (if you just take the New York Times, there’s Judith Miller who used the newspaper to sell the Iraq War; and there’s more).

Second, and here is where it gets interesting, you actually can combine professional journalistic practice and personal opinions - just like you can combine professional journalistic practice and comedy (for many younger people, Jon Stewart, a comedian, is the most trusted journalist in the US, according to polls) - because readers are smart enough to see what’s going on.

As a reader I know very well where Josh Marshall is coming from when I read TPM, and I agree with him some of the time, while disagreeing with him some other part of the time. Whether or not there is an opinion doesn’t matter - because it’s not hidden. The opinion is not the point - just like when you watch The Daily Show you know that while a lot of it is comedy, it’s actually based on journalistic practice (in fact, a lot of the jokes are built around the kind of careful background checking that most journalists are supposed to do, for example when they pair what some politician says with what s/he said yesterday).