Barbarians at the Gates of the Fourth Estate

There's a great article over at the New York Times about some recent blogger-related dust-ups and it posits the question, "Have bloggers gone too far?" in lines like this, which refers to bloggers who may have pressured Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, to resign after he allegedly claimed that U.S. soldiers were intentionally targeting some journalists in Iraq:

But while the bloggers are feeling empowered, some in their ranks are openly questioning where they are headed. One was Jeff Jarvis, the head of the Internet arm of Advance Publications, who publishes a blog at buzzmachine.com. Mr. Jarvis said bloggers should keep their real target in mind. "I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth," he cautioned.

At the same time, some in the traditional media are growing alarmed as they watch careers being destroyed by what they see as the growing power of rampant, unedited dialogue.

Steve Lovelady, a former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal and now managing editor of CJR Daily, the Web site of The Columbia Journalism Review, has been among the most outspoken.

"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail," he lamented online after Mr. Jordan's resignation."

I think this is culturally historic marker. I think that we've woken up in the future, and that future is going to have a journalism that looks more like the broadsheets of our early days (i.e. Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac, of which this blog takes as one of its founding inspirations) than the Newspaper hey dey of 1890s-1970s.

Media consolidation has made the "Fourth Estate" sluggish, timid, pandering, greedy, lazy, and, worst of all, incurious. I think the same could be said for our culture as a whole.

The more we have, the less we want. What else could possibly explain voter turn-outs of less than 50%?

And then a miracle happened: the Internet. Something so dangerous -- and so useful! -- basically fell into our laps. Ways of communicating with anyone around the world that would have been unimaginable 15 years ago are now commonplace. Beautiful things, like Amazon, Ebay and Google happen on the Internet, but so does hate speech, sex crime, fraud and terrorism.

I think blogs are one of the many miracles inside the miracle. And I think media professionals, like music professionals and travel agents, have good reason to be frightened by it. Big changes are coming your way: firm, even criminal distinctions between on-record and off-record quotes; balooning libel problems; a very dumb-but-powerful political beast; a new democratic form that looks like a tabloid, acts like a ballot initiative, and moves like a street mob; a newspaper that's written by its readers.

And I say this even though I am dismayed by how conservative bloggers are helping to give this president cover and are deceiving simple people on a daily -- even hourly -- basis.