Blogging used to be the hot new thing. That was back in the dark ages of the Bush administration.
I’m not sure when I first discovered blogs, but it was probably around 2002, about two years after I had transitioned to reading most of my newspapers online. I also don’t remember what blog it was, but my guess is that the site is long defunct.
Something about blogs grabbed me immediately. I liked reading one person’s take on things, freely acknowledged as being one person’s opinion but backed up by links to the sources from which the opinion was derived, and often expressed informally and conversationally compared to the dry prose of most newspapers of the day. I liked the ability to comment, which wasn’t available at newspapers back then except through the laborious and hit-or-miss process of writing letters to the editor that might or might not (probably not) be selected for publication.
It was years before I became a blogger myself, and that was initially a lark with a free site set up by my son. I had no intention of ever using it, but a few months later I decided—on a sudden whim—to get serious about it and see what would happen. Little did I know that almost fourteen years later I’d still be blogging. At the time, I would have been surprised to learn I’d still be blogging fourteen days later.
Blogs had their heyday during the Bush administration, particularly individual blogs like this one. Now it’s all changed, of course, and blogs are somewhat passe, superseded largely by social media and also some group blogs. The latter spread the labor and offer readers more of a variety of points of view, and also encourage clicks by putting up new content often.
As all of this was transpiring, the news was changing, too. I’ve chronicled the beginnings of the transition away from the strict separation between straight news and opinion journalism in my posts about Walter Cronkite (see this and this), but now the two are a seamless fusion in which straight reporting has practically disappeared (if it ever existed in the first place). These days—and for quite a few years now—what is presented as straight news is a sometimes-subtle sometimes-flagrant blend of facts, suppositions, assumptions, misrepresentations, and omissions designed to lead the reader to a certain point of view rather than inform the reader of what happened.
There were many influences that led to this point: the turning point during Vietnam that Cronkite represented, the 24-hour news cycle as a hungry beast demanding to be fed, the rise of TV news as entertainment, as well as the internet influences of blogs and then social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Although blogs are no longer so influential in terms of the MSM, they did garner a great deal of attention from regular journalists at the beginning. A lot of that attention featured attempts to say how superior journalists were, because journalists had all those trustworthy layers of fact-checking, all that experience and credentials, all that access to trustworthy government sources—in other words, all that skill and experience and inside info. But what subsequently happened is that newspaper reporting—already suffering—grew increasingly to feature the very flaws that the reporters had tried to pin on blogs.
These days when I read the MSM I usually have to wade through fiskable sentence after fiskable sentence. The term “fiskable” comes from the verb “to fisk,” coined to represent something that was happening as a result of the blogosphere: the penchant of bloggers to take an article from the MSM and refute it and critique it, sentence by sentence, almost word for word.
It was often ridiculously easy to do so. Articles were full of unsourced conclusions couched as tautologies, as well as quotes from anonymous “officials” that way-too-often turned out to be garbage. Then on to the next, and the next. Reporters grew younger and younger (and it wasn’t just that I grew older and older), bureaus closed down and papers relied more and more on stringers who had their own agendas.
Newspapers are still pretty good for covering some things, although nowhere near as good as they should be. For example, the fires in California have been covered pretty well, although of course there are some mistakes and revisions of the kind one might expect in a fast-breaking story of some complexity and detail. But once we get to the “why” of the fires, which concerns the interface of politics and science, the opinion journalism propaganda kicks in, big time.
To describe and link to the myriad ways that has occurred would be another long, long post, and this one is long enough already anyway. For now I’ll just say that it’s almost obligatory for each MSM article to add something simplistic such as “of course, the fires are all due to global warming, something Trump denies” while often failing to link to any scientific articles actually backing them up, and while often ignoring the ones that say otherwise and offer details on the extraordinarily complex set of causes and possible solutions to the wildfire problem in California (here was my quick effort at the latter).
In the last couple of years I’ve grown even more wary and weary of looking at the MSM. But it still influences a great many people, and it’s still our basic source for many stories. So there’s no way I’m going to be ignoring it. Although distrust of the MSM is high, most people read it and most people are still influenced by it in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious.
