High Masculine Tones

There's been a fair bit of flapping about the credentialing of about thirty webloggers for this year's Democratic Convention (a smaller number will likely be at the GOP shindig). I liked David Weinberger's early take:

This event marks the day that blogging became something else. Exactly what isn't clear yet, and the culture clash is resulting in public functions that, because there is no single culture of blogging, are Dostoyevskian in their awkwardness.

Take the breakfast the DNC threw for us bloggers. We were taken into a function room in the Back Bay Hilton with a breakfast spread and tables with actual table cloths. Behind us, separated by a few steps, were about 30 members of the Real Media. No scrambled eggs or tables for them. Nope, this was our damn breakfast.

The organizers finally got us all seated — by refusing to serve coffee until butts were in chairs and mouths were zipped — and brought up a set of speakers. But one had the sense that we bloggers were being watched by the media as if we were polar bears in the zoo. Would we ask questions as astute as theirs? Were we going to live up to journalistic standards? And, more important, what standards are we supposed to be living up to?

For example, after the breakfast, the bloggers were swarmed by the media. "You know one difference between you and us," said a friendly guy from NPR, "We don't applaud for the speakers." But, heck, it was Howard Dean and I'll be damned if I'm not going to stand and clap for him.

The media are trying to figure us out. The DNC is trying to figure us out. We are always — and in famously self-absorbed ways — trying to figure us out. The difference is that now our presence is undeniable. We are now officially an anomaly.

(His photos on the excesses of unauthorized free speech are also worth a look.)

There's been far too much of the usual idiocy about whether or not weblogs are somehow replacing traditional journalism, and whether this assault represents some sort of threat to the amazingly high-minded and ethical standards that are the norm in big media today.

My favorite hand-wringer has to be Thomas McPhail, professor of media studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Hey, "media studies" -- he ought to have some well-informed views on the impact of this new media genre: ''They're certainly not committed to being objective. They thrive on rumor and innuendo,'' McPhail says. Bloggers "should be put in a different category, like 'pretend' journalists."

In a similar New York Times piece, the good Prof McPhail was quoted as saying: "They have no pretense to objectivity. They don't cover both sides."

I see -- that's the key to "objectivity." Relativistic binary logic -- two (and only two) equally valid sides to every issue. How profound. What a rich epistemic framework to promote democratic discourse!

I'm not sure how many of the webloggers at the convention (nifty set of aggregated RSS feeds here) are pretending to re-package press releases and repeat conventional wisdom, trying to be like the real journalists. I do notice, however, that big media is increasingly aping the norms and feel of its emergent counterpart, however clumsily.

Obviously, some people in the mainstream media institutions are threatened by this troubling new development. But why? Nobody with any sense suggests that weblogs can match the major organizations in terms of news-gathering capacity, or impact. The threat to the media monopoly is a chimera.

One real change that weblogs do represent, however, is a means for ordinary people to speak back to media, and to demand accountability -- outside acceptable channels such as filtered letters to the editor. The ability for anyone to grab the microphone (however tiny the amplifier) makes those who currently have a tight grasp on it uncomfortable.