Reportage Medialog

A new survey has shown that 51% of US journalists use blogs editorsweblog reports:

According to the latest Annual Euro RSCG Magnet and Columbia University Survey of the Media, 51% of journalists, combared to 11% of all US internet users (according to eWeek), are using weblogs regularly and 28% rely on them for their daily reporting. By contrast, only 1% of journalists believe in their credibility. The study is based on responses of 1,202 journalist from the US and other countries worldwide (no further details regarding the other countries given on Euro RSCG Magnet ). Of journalist who reported using blogs 70% use blogs for work-related tasks: they use blogs to find story ideas, researching and referencing facts, finding sources and uncovering breaking news. However, only few journalists post on blogs or have their own blogs. “Such activities might be seen as compromising objectivity and thus credibility.”

Steven S. Ross, associate professor at Columbia University and a partner in the study said on Euro RSCG Magnet: “As blogs continue to gain in popularity, quality and influence, it is becoming imperative that journalists and journalism students continue to integrate blogs, especially blogs that cover technology, into their reporting practices. A number of credible and influential Weblogs – such as Scobleizer, Gizmodo, and Boing Boing – provide an invaluable trove of research, story ideas, and other information that current and future journalists would be remiss not to leverage in their reporting.”

The low general score on credibility contrasted with the high level of use is fascinating. I believe it shows the coexistence of two competing paradigms currently at work in the media sphere. The credibility issue is one firmly rooted in traditional understandings of objectivity while the use of blogs is rooted in a new multimodal journalism practice that is still trying to formulate an appropriate epistemology.

Technorati Tags: blogging and journalism

There has been some angry reaction to Arianna Huffington’s speculations about Judith Miller’s motives, that I quoted in my last entry. Richard Cohen in the Washington Post thinks it’s “ugly”:

The fury at Miller is ugly and does journalism no good. Whatever her politics, whatever her journalistic sins (if any), whatever the whatevers, she is in jail officially for keeping her pledge not to reveal the identity of a confidential source. (If that’s not the case, then we don’t know otherwise.) That pledge is no different than the one Bob Woodward made to Mark (Deep Throat) Felt.

While Huffington’s column was pure speculation (a reasonable activity for a columnist) it did attempt to do something that Cohen in his cheerleading does not do. Those, who like Cohen, want to beatify St Judith as the patron saint of confidential sources are making the same mistake that Miller herself made in her disastrous WMD reporting: they are not paying enough attention to motive.

If Miller is as good a journalist as her supporters are making out then she would never have been tricked into believing Amhed Chalabi’s furfies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons stash, she would have asked the simple questions about Chalabi’s motives and reliability as a source.

Those who speculate that there is more to the Miller case than meets the eye are only using their well honed journalistic instincts because the bare facts as they stand do not make sense. Every other journalist called upon by the special prosecutor has found a way - an ethical way - around jail time. Rove and numerous other White House sources have come forward, so she can’t be protecting them - and why would she protect a political source who was trying to use her to manipulate public opinion anyway? Unless of course she was more complicit in that manipulation than she cares to admit.

The reality is that no matter what facts finally emerge it seems that Miller’s pledge is indeed very different from “the one Bob Woodward made to Mark (Deep Throat) Felt.” This is necessarily so because the world of politics and the world of journalism has changed so markedly that the simplicity of the old codes no longer seem to work in such a straightforward manner.

It seems that the American Society of Journalists and Authors has thought more carefully about the Miller case than Cohen. The board of the organisation decided to reject the recommendation of their First Amendment Committee that Miller be given a Conscience in Media award. According to Editor and Publisher the decision was made because the board felt that “Miller’s career, taken as a whole, did not make her the best candidate for the award” and because of “divided opinions on the board over whether her recent actions merit the award.”

The earlier vote by the First Amendment committee had been narrowly in favor of giving Miller the award and was not made without internal controversy. One member Anita Bartholomew resigned in protest, writing in her letter of resignation:

“The First Amendment is designed to prevent government interference with a free press. Miller, by shielding a government official or officials who attempted to use the press to retaliate against a whistleblower, and scare off other would-be whistleblowers, has allied herself with government interference with, and censorship of, whistleblowers. When your source IS the government, and the government is attempting to use you to target a whistleblower, the notion of shielding a source must be reconsidered. To apply standard practices regarding sources to hiding wrongdoing at the highest levels of government perverts the intent of the First Amendment.”

Arianna Huffington has posted an interesting alternate scenario of Judith Miller’s involvement in the Plame scandal in her latest Alternet column. Although Huffington sources her scenario only vaguely, to something “floated in the halls” of the Times building, it does provide a credible reading that makes sense of Miller’s heroics in a situation where many other journalists have found ethical ways around an outright refusal to testify.

It’s July 6, 2003, and Joe Wilson’s now famous op-ed piece appears in the Times, raising the idea that the Bush administration has “manipulate[d]” and “twisted” intelligence “to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.” Miller, who has been pushing this manipulated, twisted, and exaggerated intel in the Times for months, goes ballistic. Someone is using the pages of her own paper to call into question the justification for the war — and, indirectly, much of her reporting. The idea that intelligence was being fixed goes to the heart of Miller’s credibility. So she calls her friends in the intelligence community and asks, Who is this guy? She finds out he’s married to a CIA agent. She then passes on the info about Mrs. Wilson to Scooter Libby (Newsday has identified a meeting Miller had on July 8 in Washington with an “unnamed government official”). Maybe Miller tells Rove too — or Libby does. The White House hatchet men turn around and tell Novak and Cooper. The story gets out.

This is why Miller doesn’t want to reveal her “source” at the White House — because she was the source. Sure, she first got the info from someone else, and the odds are she wasn’t the only one who clued in Libby and/or Rove (the State Dept. memo likely played a role too)… but, in this scenario, Miller certainly wasn’t an innocent writer caught up in the whirl of history. She had a starring role in it. This also explains why Miller never wrote a story about Plame, because her goal wasn’t to write a story, but to get out the story that cast doubts on Wilson’s motives. Which Novak did.