THE GROUND SHIFTS

In all the chatter about blogging vs. journalism, there's been a lot of overstatement, blue-skying and just plain silliness. Mainstream media will be with us for a long time. The possibility it will be supplanted by blogs &mdash no matter how well researched, written and presented &mdash is a long shot of winning-the-lottery proportions.

But the explosion of blogging is changing journalism. Bloggers have emerged as excellent press critics: keeping alive stories that mainstream media miss, holding feet to flames, exposing weaknesses. It has resulted in changes. There has never been an agency or institution that could really hold the press to account (not press councils, nor industry associations, nor ombudspersons). Now there is: the combined weight of several dozen sharp, thoughtful and passionate bloggers and their equally involved readers.

Today, Jay Rosen at PressThink argues persuasively that blogging has caused a major shift in the landscape of political reporting in the U.S.

There is a smear campaign launched against John Kerry. But that is not the only thing going on with the Swift Boat Veterans. The press may have knocked down the most serious charges. But the idea of the press as the great adjudicator has also been knocked down.

Rosen hangs his arguments on the unfolding of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story. (Briefly: the SBVFT, led by long-time political operatives, and with deep but unofficial ties to the Republican Party, unleashed TV ads that attacked John Kerry with unprovable innuendo and, in some cases, outright lies.)

Rosen writes:

Jonathan Last put it this way: "The combination of talk radio, a publishing house, blogs, and Fox News has given conservatives a voice independent of the old media." Independence from the press is not an easy thing for the press to appreciate, but this is exactly what the Swift Boat Veterans have, I think, demonstrated.

The SBVFT story was ignored by the mainstream media until it was basically forced to cover it by the sheer weight of information and interest generated by dozens of blogs. But that isn't what has provoked the change Rosen sees. What has is that the story still has significant traction even after mainstream media considered the claims thoroughly reported and discredited.

That the story is still there, after being dealt with has left old media stunned, Rosen writes:

Here and there it is spoken of outright: "I spotted the headline in the Sunday Tribune's first edition early Saturday afternoon," wrote Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader. He is referring to William Rood's first person account of Kerry's courageous actions as a Swift Boad commander, published Aug. 22. Rood, a Chicago Tribune editor, was a Swift Boat skipper himself. Miner, a journalist, recalls his reaction:

"That's it," I thought, naively, after reading the first few paragraphs. "The issue's off the table."

And he was stunned to discover it wasn't. The same feeling was there when Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe, appearing Aug. 19 on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, told John O'Neill, author of Unfit for Command and one of the veterans making the charges, "You haven't come within a country mile of meeting first-grade journalistic standards for accuracy." That's what "keeps this story in the tabloids," said Oliphant, but of course he was saying this not "in the tabloids," but on the very respectable Newshour.

...Host Jim Lehrer, always mindful to make a show of balance, struggled for the name of a [Web] site rebutting the charges [after O'Neill directed viewers to the SBVFT web site]: "Is there a web site that's comparable to that?"

Yes there is, Oliphant replied. But instead of naming Media Matters, or MoveOn.org he said: "it's called the daily press, which is the most difficult thing for these guys to deal with." But in fact it hasn't been difficult at all, and that is what's so stunning to Oliphant and company.

Among the many, many quotes in the article is one from a Aug. 24 blog post by Matt Wretchard at Belmont Club:

"The undercard in the Kerry vs Swiftvets bout is Mainstream Media vs Kid Internet, two distinctly different fights, but both over information. The first is really the struggle over the way Vietnam will be remembered by posterity.... But the undercard holds a fascination of its own. The reigning champion, the Mainstream Media, has been forced against all odds to accept the challenge of an upstart over the coverage of the Swiftvets controversy."

I think Rosen is right: this episode is going to change the way political journalists do their job. They will have to: the whole thing has revealed that the concept of the media as "gatekeeper" or, in Rosen's word, "adjudicator" has been substantially undermined.

(This isn't all down to bloggers. The way media cover major political events &mdash such as elections &mdash has been a problem for a while now, for reasons that don't need to rehashed here.)

It may appear there are dangers here: a group that has been largely proven to be led by liars and hacks has been able to shape the political debate for a prolonged period of time, force itself onto the mainstream media and continue to have an impact after the media thought they had "dealt with it."

If that is the danger, the way past it is for the media to get over it's "shock" and take a hard look at the way it covers politics. If that change happens, it will be because of blogs.

(Dave Winer at Scripting News picked up a quote that's relevant to all this:

Glenn Reynolds: "With accredited bloggers at both conventions, this can fairly be called the first presidential election to be blogged. And that just might matter &mdash though if it does, it will be as much because of big-media vices as it is of bloggers' virtues."

9:40:11 PM