BERATING CBCJim Elve, who has done more than anyone to promote blogging in Canada, is taking on the CBC over a look at blogging on The Current Tuesday. At Blogs Canada, Elve has posted a letter he has sent to the CBC. It reads in part:
I was extremely disappointed with the one-sided nature of your report. You spent plenty of time on the pitfalls and perils of blogging. You cast aspersions on the credibility of bloggers. You trotted out legal experts whose expertise is limited to the United States. This is all par for the course. Over the past few months, numerous news articles and features have been published on bloggers who were fired from their jobs due to their blogs. It ain't news. Well, maybe it is news but its just one part of a big story. I kept waiting for the part where you would talk about progressive companies who use employee blogs as an effective public relations tool. I waited to hear about people who were hired on the basis of the writing abilities and research skills that their blogs display. I listened to hear how bloggers, untethered by editors and corporate sponsors, acted as fact-checkers and whistle-blowers on the mainstream media. In short, I looked for balance and fairness. I didn't find it. Props to Elve for the work he does promoting blogs and for jumping to the defense of bloggers. But after following the links from his site to The Current's web site, reading the partial transcript of the section on blogging and listening to snippets of the audio, I'm not sure the criticism is warranted. Anna Marie Tremonti's report wasn't presented as an overview of blogging, she was looking at specific aspects of it, primarily privacy, bloggers' rights and credibility. And other than a few slips (both the host or the interviewer, for example, were fuzzy on the dust-up over Dean campaign payment to bloggers), it seems like a credible piece. (As I said, I've only listened to parts of the audio: I may have more to say tomorrow after I've had a chance to listen to the whole thing. Yes, I recorded the streaming audio.) A lot of bloggers are defensive, understandable because of some of the truly horrid ways blogging has been treated in mainstream media. And most often when media takes a look at blogging, the tone is dismissive. But I don't think that's the case here. UPDATE: I was originally pointed to Jim Elve's piece by a short post at Todd Maffin's I Love Radio. When I went back to get the link, the post was gone, making me wonder only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, if he's fallen afoul of some of the issues raised in The Current's report. (UPDATE: That should, of course, be Tod Mafffin.)
TECHNORATI TAG: BLOGGING |
MOVING ON OVER
I've been using this site as a mirror for my main site, mostly through a period of redesign. I won't be posting here for the next little while (at least until I figure out what to do with this site). I will continue to post media-related matters at Notes From a Teacher. If you have this site bookmarked, you'll probably want to change it. |
FACING HORROR IIEarlier today, I pointed to Ron Steinman's essay exploring issues raised by sometimes horrific photos and video from the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami. (Post below.) The Christians Science Monitor has added to he debate with Susan Llewelyn Leach's piece, How to tell the story of the dead without offending the living.
Natural disasters, manmade calamities, and wars all produce imagery that can shock and sometimes offend. Yet how the media communicate the magnitude of an event depends heavily on who the audience is and how far they are from the unfolding drama. So can a tragedy on the scale of the tsunami - with 150,000 dead, and counting - be conveyed to an audience a world away without graphic images of death?
TECHNORATI TAGS: MEDIA ETHICS, PHOTOJOURNALISM |
FACING HORRORRon Steinman pokes around the issues of photographic truth-telling and of the willingness of readers to face reality in an interesting essay at Digital Vision Network. A couple of quotes:
Almost as soon as the photos and words appeared in print and on TV screens, editors, reporters and news executives started to receive e-mail, phone calls and letters that attacked them for showing too many powerful pictures of the disaster. Suddenly many Americans had become squeamish about death, especially those of the many children swept away in the wave's fury. There were debates in newsrooms that were not about a photo's power, but about whether a single picture, or, in the case of TV, a sequence of pictures, served to exploit the horror of an event that was beyond belief and one that would not go away. The debates he's talking about are standing debates in newsrooms, whether it's dealing with a tragedy on the scale of the Indian Ocean tsunami, or a single picture of a local fatal traffic accident. But, as he points out, the internet has brought some new considerations into those soulsearching agruments.
The Internet, unless it is a mainstream Web site, meaning it takes responsibility for its content, gets a free ride when it comes to any moral review of what it presents. When you are on your computer, it is the most personal act of communication with something that is both private and distant and therefore nothing you share with anyone. Pictures and text on the Internet move around the world in an instant, sent everywhere simultaneously in an effort to share in what some call "citizen journalism." Is that an act alone or something we have yet to understand? I always thought reading a newspaper or magazine, even a book was highly personal and something you did by yourself. When the audience complains that it does not want to look at something too graphic over breakfast or before dinner, I wonder about its ability to process truth, or, as I said earlier, the real reality. Legacy media, in order to maintain audience, has to err on the side of the squeamish. Wander too far into unpleasant truth, and the impact goes from a few phone calls and letters to the editor to cancelled subscriptions and channel switching. The internet, on the other hand, answers a huge demand from those who want unmediated access to reality. Some of the interest may be prurient, but that can't be the whole story. Whenever I've posted items about significant news events and how media treats them — the beheading of Nick Berg, the death of Boston College student Victoria Snelgrove, the amateur videos from the tsunami — there has been a significant spike in visitors to this site, driven by Google searches. Newspapers have attempted to deal with issues of the often upsetting nature of reality by "hiding" graphic photos on inside pages, with front page warnings. Steinman's final point raises troubling questions, not so much about media, but about audience.
When the audience complains that it does not want to look at something too graphic over breakfast or before dinner, I wonder about its ability to process truth, or, as I said earlier, the real reality. For me that does not bode well for the future, a future where I know we will witness more tragedies that people create as well as the natural tragedies over which we mortals have no control.
TECHNORATI TAG: PHOTOJOURNALISM |
MASSLESS MEDIA ONLINEThe much-discussed Atlantic Monthly article The Massless Media is now available online. William Powers does a good job of putting a lot of things in perspective, tracing what seems to be a historical loop from a vibrant, fractious press in the early days of the U.S. to the the emerging vibrant, fractious mediascape of the internet age. Lots to chew on. (My earlier post on this is here)
TECHNORATI TAG: MASSLESS MEDIA | SOURCE: LEONARD WITT AT PUBLIC JOURNALISM NETWORK |
Last update: 1/30/05; 10:22:13 PM .
