Contextualizing

by digby

Jane discusses this article in today’s NY Times about how blogging is affecting journalism and she makes this important point:

They do not spend the hours and days sifting through raw data now available to average people on the internet. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. That is not what they do. If you want to know some obscure detail about something Judith Miller did or said in June of 2003 you call emptywheel. If you need to know about journalists named in the subpoenas sent to the White House in January 2003 you email Jeralyn. If you expect that kind of depth of knowledge about details from the people whose job it is to dig up new dirt in this case, they don’t have it. They don’t have the time.

In this light bloggers serve the function of analysts. Or re-analyzers, more aptly, who attempt to contextualize as they sort through available data and look for patterns, inconsistencies and greater truths. For my money if I was trying to marry a blog with a newsroom that’s where I’d start — I’m constantly amazed that with all the access to information now available the big news bureaus don’t have a deeper pool of researchers to be the adjunct memories of people who spend their time in the development of external news sources.

There was a guy who did this kind of journalism long before technology made it possible for many of us to carry on the tradition. At their best, bloggers are the heirs to IF Stone, whose methods wwere described by his friend Victor Navasky this way:

His method: To scour and devour public documents, bury himself in The Congressional Record, study obscure Congressional committee hearings, debates and reports, all the time prospecting for news nuggets (which would appear as boxed paragraphs in his paper), contradictions in the official line, examples of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights and liberties. He lived in the public domain. It was his habitat of necessity, because use of government sources to document his findings was also a stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without all the documentation?

Sound familiar? And while we scruffy bloggers are (mostly) not marxists, we are greeted with great skepticism because we are unregulated, uncredentialed, and in some cases psuedonymous, so we also must go to great lengths to document our findings. Luckily, the technology that gives us such amazing instant access to reams of information also gives us the ability to link directly to our source material — as Arianna once described it “showing our work.” And over time we gain credibility with our readers the same way that newspapers do.

What Jane says about contextualizing is absolutely correct. If you followed the Whitewater scandal (or attempted to) you came to realize that the journalists who were writing about it were so caught up in day to day reporting that somewhere along the line they lost sight of both the big picture and the details. It became a daily exercize in futility trying to sort out what exactly was going on. Until Gene Lyons’ articles in Harpers (that led to his book “Fools for Scandal”) and then a couple of jury trials, I honestly couldn’t figure out what was going on. And I read three or four papers a day at the time. It was a story in desperate need of context, research and command of detail, mostly because it was a story being dribbled out a daily basis by political operatives and Arkansas opportunists to journalists who, in the midst of daily reporting, couldn’t see the larger story. (I have no idea where their editors were.)

I didn’t know how that worked in those days, thinking that journalists would see through spin and report it if it was clearly partisan. But I was wrong. They did fall for that story and turned it into an unintelligible, meaningless scandal that harrassed the president from almost his first day in office.

Today, certain bloggers would keep meticulous track of details, speculation and obvious spin and would report and discuss them in real time. Others would bring the whole story into historical perspective. Still others would try to tie all the disparate threads together to show larger patterns and trends. And many would speculate about the meaning of the scandal and the political ramifications. The scandal might happen anyway, but at least there would also be informed, engaged readers and easy access to those who have taken the time to analyze and contextualize the story as it unfolds. The alternative is to continue to allow the powerful triumverate of official sources, professional PR flacks and political operatives to lead the press (and, therefore, the country) around by the nose as they have so often in the last 15 years.

I’m not suggesting that blogging is a replacement for mainstream journalism. The daily papers, news broadcasts and news weeklies are indispensible. But more and more, people are recognizing mainstream journalism’s vulnerability to conventional wisdom, establishment pressure and partisan spin. And the longstanding reliance on he said/she said “objectivity” is simply no longer adequate in the modern world of sophisticated public relations. Blogs fill in some of the gaps.

I’m a little surprised that so many reporters are fighting them so hard instead of doing the smart thing, which is co-opt them. Good bloggers can be a reporter’s best friends if he learns how to use them.

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