For
a variety of reasons I try to stay out of the debates over blogs as
such, what they’re good or bad at and the rest. But this morning I was
alerted to an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Skube,
a journalism professor at Elon University. The sum of the piece is that
the blogosphere is as rife with disputation as it is thin on
information, or more specifically, reporting, writing that demands “time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance.”
Now, fair enough. There’s certainly no end of blog pontificating
fueled by puffed-up self-assertion rather than facts. But Skube’s piece
reads with a vagueness that suggests he has less than a passing
familiarity with the topic at issue. And I will confess to you that
what really caught my attention was that in a column bewailing how
blogs don’t do any real reporting one of the four bloggers he mentioned
was me.
Now, whether we do any quality reporting at TPM is a matter of
opinion. And everyone is entitled to theirs. So against my better
judgment, I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to
believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as
examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the
blogosphere.
Now, I get criticized plenty. And that’s fair since I do plenty of
criticizing. And I wouldn’t raise any of this here if it weren’t for
what came up in Skube’s response.
Not long after I wrote I got a reply: “I didn’t put your name into
the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent
I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt …”
This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly
does use me as an example — along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and
Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn’t seem to
remember what he’d written in his own opinion column on the very day it
appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat
that he wrote about sites he admits he’d never read.
To which I got this response: “I said I did not refer to you in the
original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought
I needed to cite more examples … “
And this is from someone who teaches journalism?
Perhaps I’m naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor
of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name
claims about a publication he concedes he’s never read.
Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube’s editor at the Times
oped page didn’t think he had enough specific examples in his article
decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual
backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few
blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off
on the addition even though he didn’t know anything about them.
I grant you that the blogosphere needs better bloggers. But, as usual, the need for better critics seems even more acute.
Talking Points Memo | Annals of Reporting
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