Brownwood Blogging & Catjuggling ? Read on......Truth & Facts: Indeed !
Op Ed: Columnists Steve Nash- Brownwood Bulletin
'Catjuggler' finds a home somewhere on the World Wide Web
“There's no politics on my Web site, not even any social commentary about catjuggling. No blogging. No references to black books or conspiracies.”
source:http://www.brownwoodbulletin.com/articles/2005/02/26/op_ed/columnists/opinion05.txt
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The new age of `news'
Published February 26, 2005
Fittingly for someone who fancied himself a journalist, it was a question that brought Jeff Gannon's downfall. It was an obviously slanted question, tossed like a softball to President Bush at a recent news conference. Gannon, who billed himself as a reporter for two conservative Web sites, asked Bush how he could work with Senate Democratic leaders "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."
You can almost hear the other reporters in the room muttering to themselves, Who is that guy? Soon afterward, Gannon was exposed on liberal blog sites as James Dale Guckert, a man with thin if nonexistent journalism credentials whose naked pictures had appeared on gay escort Web sites.
Gannon was admitted into the splashiest press fishbowl in the world--the White House. Gannon infiltrated this select group as a reporter for the Web sites Talon News and GOPUSA, both owned by a Texas Republican activist. He never got full White House press credentials, which require an FBI background check. He quit after his background was exposed.
That touched off lots of debate about whether the White House had let a conservative political partisan--a rather unusual one at that--slip into the White House press pool.
But as The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, the White House briefing room has become a home for all manner of partisans who call themselves journalists. At a Feb. 1 briefing, White House spokesman Scott McClellan had this question tossed at him: "Does the president believe in Commandment No. 6--`Thou shalt not kill'--as it applies to the U.S invasion of Iraq?"
It's safe to say that one didn't come from a conservative Republican plant.
The flash of heat and light around the Gannon story illuminates a far bigger struggle. It's a battle for minds and eyeballs--yours--that has often been touted as New Media vs. Old Media.
In the latter category are mainstream newspapers and network TV news, which tout their objectivity and promise coverage that is not tainted by partisan politics. It seems that more people are suspicious about that, but that's the intent.
In the former category are the Internet bloggers, cable television news shows and talk radio, all of whom traffic in clear, often loudly expressed opinion that frames everything they report. They're doing "opinion news--news that reflects one's own beliefs and preferences and tends to filter out dissenting views," as a recent report from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press put it.
Is that new? Nah. It's actually as old as the republic, when newspapers from front to back were clearly identified with a political philosophy and a Thomas Paine could rally Americans to embrace independence by distributing "Common Sense" far and wide.
What's new is how the news spreads. Those who prefer "opinion news" tend to find it on cable TV, talk radio and a dizzy proliferation of Internet sites.
Daily newspapers still separate objective reporting in their news pages from opinion writing by columnists and the editorial page.
The idea of objectivity in news reporting is, relatively speaking, a fairly recent development. In the earliest days of American journalism, newspapers were expected to present a partisan view. Newspapers took sides in their news columns and made no secret of it. It was that vigorous, partisan press that prompted President John Adams to make the terrible decision to sign the Sedition Act in 1798.
After World War I, the idea of objective coverage began to take hold. Papers were still identified by political ideology, but a concerted effort was made by many mass-circulation dailies to scrub such bias from the news columns. There were many reasons for this. But among the most prominent: science. In his book "News Values," former Tribune Publisher Jack Fuller argues that the idea of objectivity arose from those seeking greater legitimacy for newspapers in an era of scientific discovery. Papers that promised the unvarnished truth flourished when readers demanded verifiable facts, not just conjecture and sensationalized opinion, in news columns.
So perhaps we're going back to the future.
The bloggers have scored some impressive scoops in recent months. They're a force. According to a Pew Research Center poll, "more people are turning away from traditional news outlets, with their decorous, just-the-facts aspirations to objectivity, toward noisier hybrid formats that aggressively fuse news with opinion or entertainment or both."
There has been a great deal of concern in television and newspaper shops about the splintering audience. The upside, for readers and viewers, is that they have more choices for news and opinion than they've ever had.
The cable channels and bloggers have rising audiences. It's worth noting, though, that the audience for NBC Nightly News is still roughly seven times as large as Fox News Channel's flagship news show, "Special Report with Brit Hume." Objective reporting still commands by far the largest audiences.
Once unleashed, new media cannot be shoehorned back into oblivion. But they do tend to evolve.
People vote with their dollars, their remote controls and their mouse clicks. It's a robust marketplace of ideas and different approaches. But the truth is still what makes this business go. Finding things out and telling people the facts remains the surest way to success.
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