Alan Rusbridger: Ignorant or Dishonest?
Dean
Ah, here we have a picture perfect example of why the mainstream press is so despised: Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian.
The biggest laugh was this bit:
In an age where some parts of the world remain no-go areas to ordinary people, like Baghdad, it's newspapers which are sending reporters like Jonathon Steel, 67, who said "he wanted to go. What happens if all the journalists pull out? There's a duty to go. There aren't any bloggers volunteering to go."
This statement is so utterly ridiculous it's impossible to know where to begin. As a blogger, I get 90% of my information on Iraq from:
A) English-speaking Iraqi bloggers living in Iraq
B) My dad, who's serving over there, whom I relay info from to my readers when I can
C) Military bloggers who are either serving there now or who have served there, some of whom are friends or at least friendly acquaintances, many of whom have reported firsthand of their experiences
D) Extraordinary volunteer bloggers like Michael Totten, Michael Yon, Steven Vincent, and other civilian bloggers who've gone over there strictly on their own dime
E) Arab press, some of it Iraqi and some of it from surrounding Arab nations
F) Government documents, most of which I no longer need the press to report to me since I can get them myself just fine, thanks.
Where I get almost none of it: cheap anti-American british tabloids like The Guardian, or, the American press itself, most of which probably thinks of The Guardian as the height of responsible war reporting.
The question is, is Rusbridger a deeply ignorant man, or simply a liar? Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume "deeply ignorant." It still says everything we need to know about why his industry is in free fall, doesn't it?
And that's why the established media need to reconsider their relationship with blogs. Bloggers aren't the competition. They're the newspapers' and cable news outlets' customers.
And they're also their suppliers. A new group of stringers with more varied expertise and who can provide more extensive coverage than anything the established media have envisioned in their wildest dreams.
But they'll have to give up their gatekeeper role.
Think about how extraordinary that is. In any previous war, it would be impossible for a civilian to take it on themselves to travel to a war zone and report back what they see.
Certainly they could get there on their own dime – but they would not have an audience to report to. What is the chance they could get a paper back home to pick up their material?
Here we have the audience, the consumer, essentially paying in advance for more news about something they have an interest in.
You don’t want to give us the full story MSM – well then to hell with you. We’ll just send our own guy in.
Actually, that's just not true. There have always been free lance journalists. The difference is the channels through which they must publish. In the past, you had to shop your story to the MSM and if they didn't pick it up, you were just SOL. Now, like Michael Yon, you can publish to the web as well as shop the story around.
Agreed. I thought I made that point:
"Certainly they could get there on their own dime – but they would not have an audience to report to. What is the chance they could get a paper back home to pick up their material?"
I guess I wasn't clear enough.
Yours,
Wince
Oh, I have to agree about the higher quality of the bloggers, and also Strategy Page, then anything out of the MSM. And yet many times when the other shoe has dropped and the mountain has turned out to be a molehill, the article which lets us know is from the MSM - a small article, in the back pages, true - but from the MSM.
Sometimes it's even on the front page.
Yours,
Wince
I'll take "C", willfully ignorant.