I have written before that bloggers may appear new to the American scene, but that they really represent only a contemporary innovation on America’s tradition of pamphleteering. America’s colonial and revolutionary writers published pamphlets on all manner of subjects, and that’s true of blogging, too.
Blogging on political affairs, whether about places near or far, is particular in one way: the blogger finds himself noticing how reporters and journalists have covered the topics in which he, too, is interested. Often, a blogger only begins writing after reading shoddy reporting. Shoddy in every which way: inaccuracies, half-truths, conflicts of interest, lack of curiosity, favoritism, dull writing, &c.
Whitewater has this problem – we’re a town with a weekly newspaper (the Register) that’s failed this community, and two nearby papers (the Gazette and the Daily Union) that cover the Whitewater only sporadically. (There’s more to be said about these two nearby daily papers, different in their ways, but I’ll leave that for another time.)
These papers have left Whitewater politicians, community leaders, and supposed people of influence (big fish only in our small pond) without the critique common in bigger cities, and healthier communities.
I’m convinced that if we had better journalism in Whitewater, we’d have a better, healthier politics. Instead, lots of asinine ideas go without a healthy public critique, convincing their asinine proponents that their ideas might – indeed, must – somehow make sense.
So, a blogger finds himself, by consequence, a press critic. Bloggers are not reporters, nor journalists. They are, instead, common people who see poor reporting for what it is, on the basis of their own reading and reflection. (I have never met anyone, ever, who did not consider me a common man, for example. There’s nothing fancy about anything I write. The only thing that makes me slightly different is that I really don’t care what anyone in the world thinks about what I write. Lots of supposedly important people in this town do care what people think, and it’s part of the reason the town’s a mess.)
In my next post, I’ll re-print the full Statement of Ethical Principles of the Associated Press’s Managing Editors. I have posted parts of the