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Yesterday’s the West Wing and blogging
Weblogging got mentioned on NBC's The West Wing. A senior white house official (Josh Lyman) jeopadizes the President's agenda for alternative fuels by causing an accident with a fuel-guzzling SUV, hitting, unfortunately, a brand-new hybrid car. A weblogger's car, who subsequently gets online to weblog about his accident. Lyman calls him and gets into a rather personal rant, which, of course, also gets weblogged right away, presumably showing a lack of ethics on the webloggers part.
Dave commented on it, referring to Michael Gartenberg who said <quote>"He's subsequently informed that "these people aren't journalists...", implying that a journalist would be "bound" by his off the record comment and not write about it and a blogger would simply ignore it (and did ignore it)."</quote> (please read the full post for context).
The "webloggers vs. journalists" debate gets to a point where people already assume the same arguments behind every move "the other side" makes (in this case: webloggers lack professionalism).
- The weblogger informs Lyman right away on the phone that he's weblogging as they're speaking (shows some ethics, doesn't it?) even though Lyman said this was "off the record".
- The biggest argument for the statement that webloggers aren't journalists is that they don't care about access. If a white house reporter had been the target of the "off the record"-rant (which was personal and abusive), she couldn't have reported on it. Why? Because she needs the access to do her job and more importantly, not reporting on it might have earned her political capital. The weblogger was involved in a car accident with a senior democratic white house official, ironically driving a Hummer. He weblogged it. That's what we do. You can't bargain with someone who only has 15 minutes of fame.
You can spin the whole thing so it makes webloggers look bad. We can spin it, too. Especially within the context of yesterday's show, I think weblogging was portrayed exactly as it should be: Independent, up-to-date, honest journalism.