How Reporters Who Attack Bloggers Are Like Beauticians

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/7409

How Reporters Who Attack Bloggers Are Like Beauticians
by RJ Eskow | May 11 2007

Bloggers like Glenn Greenwald and Digby continue to make excellent points about mainstream journalists and their unwarranted attacks on bloggers. Here's one aspect of this conflict that's been overlooked, however: Reporters' ad hominem attacks on bloggers represent the enforcement tactics of an informal guild looking to protect its economic interests by any means necessary.

Left-wing bloggers continue to tear their hair and ask why far more vicious attacks on the press by conservatives like Limbaugh and Ann Coulter don't trigger the indignation and slashing counterattacks that better documented and more civil progressive blog critiques do.

The answer is simple: Coulter and Limbaugh don't threaten the franchise. They may differ from David Broder and Joe Klein in style and content, but they are part of the same economic system. As highly-paid pundits, they are in the guild. That means they don't threaten the economic security of Klein, Broder, Brian Williams, and other blog-bashers.

snip//

Either bloggers should be silent, says Klein, or they'll lose their raw data. The other option - that of actually addressing those misstatements, sloppy reporting, and distortions of fact - never occurs to him. And why should it? To acknowledge the validity of the criticism would be to recognize the limits of his guild. And that's not in his sociological or economic self-interest.

In other words, Klein and the other journalists are no different from beauticians shaking their heads over an unauthorized shop's bad work, except in one respect: Beauticians do a better job of policing their own members.

You're seeing the naked self-interest of journalists being revealed just as clearly as that of the beauticians. And in the words of the late Warren Zevon, it ain't that pretty at all.

[SteppingRazor]

1. OK, but...

so what?

Point being, if a group of people really does think that there's people doing for free what they do for a living, shouldn't they be scared and self-interested at that point?

The fallacy in this post's argument — or, perhaps, in the threatened feelings of journalists, if the post is dead on — is the underlying assumption that blogs could supplant the pros. The movement from print to online is certainly a noteworthy one, perhaps the most important thing happening in journalism today, but I don't think that heralds the death of journalism as a profession, to be brushed aside for a host of amateur bloviators.