News began to suffer when reporters changed to columnists without telling anyone, and Josh "Chester" Manchester is taking the industry leaders to task, defending the act of blogging:
The New York Times has no such feedback mechanism. Its editorials are strangely absent of authorship — who even to respond to? who to email? Only the Times chooses which letters to the editor to publish. Yet despite all this, it claims objectivity. Objectivity is only worth something if you rely on the polished, refined, news-as-a-product that is the output of the established press — and if you only rely on one outlet. If you want everything — the good, the bad, the ugly, the contradictory, the confusing, the outtakes, and the raw materials — you turn to a blog, you probably turn to several, and you know that you are seeing life as it is, not as it is polished up to be in Manhattan.
I've likened most bloggers, amateur commentators with unique intellectual and vocational talents, as a strengthening regulatory commission for journalists who, entrusted with the distribution (and not the creation) of news, serve as the milkmen of information. Bloggers who report are the wild card, their work something to be watched closely and expectantly. On that, Chester challenges low expectations the elite have for bloggers' authenticity. Dismissing bloggers as transient and their identity unverifiable is puzzling, since journalists' own standard for accountability exists in axiom more than practice. Rathergate aside, how else to explain the startlingly common story of sloppy subcontracting?
Speaking on Fox News Live with David Asman yesterday, Chester made an excellent point about news coming from Iraq: that a broadcaster ignoring information from Central Command is providing unbalanced news. As one can tell from my archives, I stopped using wire reports as my primary news source for Iraq when I realized that the substance — and nearly all positive information — in most media stories came from military press releases. Elite agencies routinely wrap three sentences of information in five paragraphs of commentary from the journalist or his bureau. Outlets who keep "color" out of their work, like the Pakistan Tribune report excerpted on Wednesday, make for a helpfully brief, dry and forthright read.