The Daily Kos, I think, broke this story which is one of the reasons that blogs are worth reading. I think it will be some time before I get to read this in the Globe (if it appears at all). Unhappy with current levels of sycophantic coverage, the republican admin is now installing fake journalists. I've posted the news site as my web page.

But haven't we also learned that a bunch of bloggers have similarly been seeded to control the agenda of pyjamastan?

Have a look at this story from Slate of a couple of weeks ago on the idea of planted bloggers. Here is another reference to this dent in bloggerdom's naiveity.

Yes, but bloggers aren't supposed to have any honour.
And journalists once upon a time did have honour.

Hah! Go read Dave Winer about the noble citizen journalists of this jet-pack future we supposedly all live in. It's all crap. Bloggers never had any honour and journalists still do. The would would be <i>exactly the same</i> without the self satisfied smugness of people like me and my time wasting typing. A would without journalism is call the fast track to the tyrant.

There are no doubt two sides to every story. I don't know who this Winer guy is but in any case I am not susceptible to that kind of hype if he's saying what I think he is. Nevertheless, not only are journalists not keeping the tyrants away, but every time anyone says anything about them, they have such a stranglehold on the airways that they stifle dissent. This was true before bloggers. And it would be true even if bloggers disappeared off the planet tomorrow. Journalists are paid to do a job that they are no longer doing very well in North America. The sooner we face this fact the better. Journalism has become a branch of entertainment and that sucks. And it's not just me saying it. There wouldn't be the phenomenon called The Daily show if this were not so. This is not resentment talking. This is not paranoia. This is just an observation. And if blogging is the yardstick I think that in itself is pretty sad. Don't you? Blah blah blah.

Nope - I depend on good newspaper journalists and radio as well. TV is largely rubbish sure but that is no great problem. What would you do without the BBC, the CBC as well as the New York Times and upteen other great papers of the world. If you think that defence aganist is not working try living in PEI where there is no real independent news and mucho to question abouto on the integrity of the governance.

NPR called the whole blogo-hatethisphrase-sphere/Jeff Gannon thing a "witch hunt". Frigging NPR. If they're covering for this weasel, then journalism is well and truly dead. The BBC just doesn't realise it yet. (the CBC is rapidly succumbing though, thank you very much)

Having said that, I shudder to think that we give so much credence to blogs. Who the hell thought we should give all these pasty nerds passes to the Rep/Dem conventions, for example?

Pasty nerds like me who have no lives, who couldn't be put in charge of the can opener.

Yay. It's made the mainstream press! Why isn't Alan Freeman a columnist? I see his byline so rarely and he usually makes sense. I've posted the Globe article as my web page.

Two things (okay, maybe three) then I'll shut up.

One: if I were made press Baron tomorrow, the first thing I would do is make newspapers a lot more boring. In the old days journalism was not unlike police work both in terms of the type of job it was and the status it had (and also the types of people who did it). That is, the people who did it were normal everyday people. Most of the time, the writer was irrelevant and the story was everything. Someone would go out, piece together a puzzle and write a report. Nobody cared about the journalist's personality and for the most part none of the writers were celebrities. So the work had to stand on its own. Sure there were moments when judgement calls had to be made, but nobody thought that that meant that *everything* was a judgement call. I think journalism could stand to move a few inches in that direction. It could also stand to be more thorough and nuanced.

I think of journalism as a kind of utility, like Hydro. To extend the metaphor what's happening now is this: instead of selling us the service like they used to they're giving us musical accompaniment, spin and colour and they're not paying sufficient attention to the thing itself. I don't want a police officer to sing show tunes and then go away when my house gets burgled. And I don't want blue non-water to come out of my taps when I turn them on. For that reason, I don't want newspapers to become blogs or women's magazines or literature. Newspapers in north America are only slightly better than television. There's too much commentary and fluff and a lot of it is repetitive and hyperbolic. You know, my father wrote a column every day for most of the time that I was growing up. And there were themes that recurred in that column, but nothing like what I see in the Globe where columnists seem to write two or three times a month on a particular issue without changing the substance of what they have to say as if they saw themselves as political agitators. In a lot of cases what this means is that in Canada we're not being saved from corruption or tyranny as much as we're being saved from liberalism. Balance is what I'd like in my opinion pieces, i.e., both in terms of frequency of columns and in terms of numbers of columnists. So, as many regular righties as lefties writing columns per paper.

Two: There are two kinds of bias that are everywhere in journalism now: what I'll call naive bias and what I'll call cynical bias. Naive bias is where the person just cannot see the merit in other points of view. When I was in university in Canada the student paper was like this. They just wouldn't print anything that they didn't want to hear. Their views were 'slightly' to the left of the NDP and it was very rare that you would hear anything that deviated from what they saw as objective reality and if you did it was called 'opinion.' Even moderate left views were 'opinion.' SayNay reminds me of those people sometimes because of her commitment to her ideology. (Just as an aside, I always find it amazing when I come here and get reamed for being a Marxist because I know Marxists and they all think I'm a enemy of the people. One day I should get SayNay and these people together so they can have the following conversation: SayNay: I can't believe you don't see what a Marxist she is... Marxist: Her? She's a counter-revolutionary! A capitalist sympathiser! She believes in free speech, private property and other bourgeois heresies etc.

Then there is cynical bias. It starts with the idea that we all have points of view and then it says that since there is no objectivity, I'm going to just publish whatever my bias is. The problem is, if you give up on objectivity altogether, you never have to question your own view. This 'there is no objectivity' position then becomes an excuse to vent the most extreme crapola. Viz: Bill O'Reilly. I know it's called 'fair and balanced' but what they mean is they're balancing the scale by making rightist pronouncements.

Three: I said journalism in North America is hurting. Your reply, Alan, was to mention the BBC (which is not North American), the New York Times (which recently had its own crisis involving journalistic fraud, heads rolled and the crisis is supposed to be over, but I'm wondering whether the problem isn't endemic) and a case involving PEI in which the press is not doing its job (which I think supports my case).

Phew. I don't know about you but I could use some lunch.

Okay. One more thing. I know. I know. You were just wondering why I don't post more often, weren't you? There's a song by Dire Straits called Money For Nothing which is a monologue/dialogue from a proletarian point of view about how easy it is to write songs. The above is not to be read as either a variation on that theme or a blanket endorsement of cops. I don't think doing journalism well, or writing columns well is easy. And I don't think cops are bastions of virtue. I don't have anything against fashion or fluff either, it's just that I don't think these should be substituted for reporting. Alright? Well, I'm glad we've settled that question. I know. I'm a dullard.

Did you say something? I just walked into the room. <p>He he. Joke. Funny funny.

Sigh. It's okay. I know what I am.

Hey. I just noticed that they've put Murray Campbell in the National columnists section with a national daily column. And he's writing about some good stuff too. Bravo. They should put Rick Salutin there too.

Oops. I'm confusing Alan Freeman with Lawrence Martin who also writes for the Globe and Mail. Lawrence Martin actually does have a column. He once wrote a funny piece about Paul Martin religion and a meeting with George Bush that I quite liked, but since I had never seen his name in the Globe before, I quickly forgot it. Shutting up now. Must do work.
Double sigh.