Commentary—

Three Cheers For Bloggers

By Jason Salzman

If the word “blog” still boggles your mind, it’s time to get over it. Blogs and the bloggers who write them are having a major impact on journalism and our country.

Trust me, the blog concept is easy to grasp. Let me explain.

Blogs are diaries posted on websites for all to read with the click of a mouse. Anyone can be a blogger and write a blog, which is actually a type of journalism.

Like other journalists, bloggers publish ideas, information, or other “news,” but bloggers do it on the Web rather than radio, TV, or the newspaper. Most bloggers don’t have editors. Most are just regular people with an extreme passion for a topic and the ability to write a lot about it. (Bloggers may update their blogs multiple times each day, but others might do once-a-month updates.) 

Because they don’t have editors questioning them about their facts, bloggers are more likely to publish mistakes. And they are more likely to publish material that does not meet the unwritten standards of the mainstream news media — like unsubstantiated gossip about politicians that can ruin people’s lives. On the other hand, bloggers have the ability to print gossip that turns out to be true and ruins peoples’ lives for good reason. They can run material that arguably should be seen by the public, but does not appear in the mainstream media.

For example, the chief CNN news executive, Eason Jordon, resigned after a blogger reported that Jordan said that the US military in Iraq had targeted and killed 12 journalists. Mainstream journalists heard Jordan make his remarks during an “off-the-record” panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, but a blogger decided to write about his comments anyway. The professional journalists present apparently thought it would be inappropriate to publish Jordan’s remarks.

Bloggers can embody the very best of journalism. They can throw their lives into researching a topic and exposing the facts. They can out-work professional journalists, digging deeper and exposing the truth about issues and people that the traditional press is too lazy to uncover. 

But there’s another, perhaps more important role that bloggers are plying these days — and this is why journalists are scared of them. Increasingly, bloggers are acting like fact checkers. 

With their high levels of motivation and increasing number, bloggers are scrutinizing the work of mainstream journalists — from former CBS News anchor Dan Rather on down — and telling the world of their mistakes. 

In the case of Rather, bloggers discovered that documents used by CBS news to substantiate a story about President George Bush’s National Guard service were forgeries. In the end, as a result of this error, senior CBS journalists were fired, and Rather himself later resigned. 

So, blogs are also a great addition to American political debate. They give anyone with keyboard the chance to bring down powerful people — or spotlight good stuff. The freewheeling nature of blogs also creates great opportunities for talent to shine and for individual initiative, in the most positive sense, to pay off.

Yes, blogs have problems, since the barriers to entering the blogger club are virtually nonexistent. And most blogs are read by few and have no influence on anyone. Some of the most talented bloggers cannot get anyone to pay attention to their work.

But at their best, bloggers are making sure journalists have their facts straight and, at least sometimes, providing information to citizens that they should be getting from the mainstream media. That’s good news for us and our democracy.

(Jason Salzman, author of Making the News: A Guide for Nonprofits and Activists, is board chair of Rocky Mountain Media Watch, a media watchdog organization based in Denver.)