The Linux Extremist

There’s a fine line between heroism and madness; sometimes, one can get a glimpse of that line being crossed. On Sunday, I saw a Sky News reporter in Northern Israel standing on a ridge outside of a town, wearing a flak jacket and informing the audience that Hezbollah rockets were still raining upon her area. The report was interrupted by the sounds of loud Hebrew radio chatter; apparently a police vehicle had pulled up just outside of shot and was telling her that it wasn’t safe and that she ought to get out of there. Undaunted, she carried on and the police drove off.

Speaking as a normal, safety-conscious human being, the police warning would have made me take shelter. However the journalist seemed to believe that because she was reporting on a situation, that she was standing outside of it and couldn’t be harmed by it. This is not an uncommon assumption; journalists often appear to think they are on the outside edge of human experience, not affected by change, and living in an isolated pocket of their own.

This perception also applies to the recent changes in technology. Yes, journalists are aware of blogging and citizen reporting, yet they somehow retain the belief that it is an animal that can be tamed, controlled, utilised, so that they can maintain their present position. This is simply not the case; blogging is going to continue its onward march, and if journalists don’t adapt to the changing times, they are going to go the way of the dinosaur.

Journalism, particularly on television, is nice work if you can get it. A good example is the programme “Fox and Friends”, which is broadcast in the morning in the United States and in the early afternoon in Europe via satellite. I’ve only watched it a few times, but it appears to involve a group of 3 people sitting around and laughing at each other’s jokes for 3 hours. Yes, they may have to get up early in order to be on the air at 6 AM, but the rest of the day can be spent fishing, sleeping or watching Muppet porn (though one shudders at the idea of journalists spending their time watching Kermit and Miss Piggy bumping ugly). Journalists get to invent panics (for example, a recent Daily Express headline predicted that the UK’s August was going to be hotter than July; this has not happened), attend big fancy dinners with politicians and if they snap pictures, kill members of the Royal Family with immunity. If they run out of ideas, they can merely reproduce ones from Reuters and Agence France Presse; seeing the sheer number of times a Reuters article is reproduced is instructive in this regard.

Bloggers, on the other hand, mostly hold other jobs; we’re reporting what we see around us. We do not get paid, and we certainly do not get sufficient free time to go angling for carp. We don’t have expense accounts, we don’t have Reuters or AFP, and we certainly don’t sit outside of a situation; we are part of it and the reporting that stems from bloggers is the view from within, which often times is better than the view from without. A good example would be the present crisis in the Middle East: which is more reliable in conveying the emotions and experience of the people on the ground, bloggers who actually live in the affected areas, or the young lady who obviously believed the thickness of her skull would afford protection from a Katyusha rocket?

Furthermore, the aura of journalistic infalliability has been severely punctured as of late; their sources are not better than ours. The Memogate affair, in which Dan Rather of CBS was shown by bloggers to have relied on forged memos in order to attack President Bush, indicates that fact checking at major news organisations is simply not as tight as it should be. It also indicates that bloggers are making sure the “official” journalists are staying on the straight and narrow.

Sky News has obviously been unnerved by this; a recent advertisement of theirs indicated that they were going to be “relaying the experiences of people on the ground”, namely, they were going to start relying on bloggers. The Guardian has made similar moves and the Telegraph has blogs for their journalists. The air is slowly being let out of the journalists’ bubble, perhaps, or they may be attempting to ride the animal rather than realise they are going to have to be subdued by it. I suggest the latter. If so, it may very well be that in the future our news will be from aggregators of blogs, and the broadcasts of bloggers; the likes of Dan Rather and Walter Cronkite will be a distant memory, consigned to the same ash heap upon which also lay the horse and carriage, vacuum tubes and pet rocks, items whose abandonment was considered an undeniable symbol of progress.

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