Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan responds appropriately (with a genteel raspberry) to David Carr’s approval for a committee to develop ethical standards for bloggers:
This sort of top-down, expert-heavy, credential-credulous media structure is exactly what blogging has so brilliantly been destroying for more than a decade. The internet is where the upstarts are on equal footing with the experts. There are few barriers to publication. And there is no need to seek the approval of a committee of elite writers and editors in order to be respected. If there are grievances over these types of editorial blogging issues, there is already a system in place to deal with them: someone writes a pissy diatribe, someone else writes a pissy diatribe in response, and everyone argues over who’s right and who’s wrong. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: This is what makes the media blogosphere go. Ceding this discussion to some committee of self-ordained experts would be a bore. Come on, already-famous editors. You guys used to be… well, if not cool exactly, at least, you know, with it.
Here’s my idea. Why don’t we deputize a committee of bloggers to devise a standard of ethics for newspapers? Among the issues that might be addressed are the proper citation, crediting, and synthesis of blogs and blog posts by the mainstream media. Without much difficulty I could produce any number of oblique references (frequently without naming them) to blogs, quotes from blogs without attribution, and outright plagiarism of blog posts in the online presence of newspapers, magazines, and so on. Just today I ran across a shameless plagiarism imitation purely fortuitous elaboration on a post by Tom Maguire in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
I humbly nominate myself for the job. I’m practically perfect for it. None of my actual bona fide credentials are relevant to the task at hand so in that sense I’m a good representative of the blogosphere. I unfailingly link to my sources in the mainstream media, I am very cautious about fair use in the quotes that I use, and, importantly, I have no animus towards newspapers, magazines, radio, or television. Which is more than you can say about the attitude the bigtime writers in the newspapers, magazines, radio, or television have towards blogs (other than their own). Further, as one of the rare inhabitants of the Center Blogosphere I don’t much care whose ox gets gored.
Failing that I nominate Glenn Reynolds, Markos Moulitsas, John Hinderaker, and Josh Marshall for the job. I’m sure they can come up with a code of ethics for print, broadcast, and online professional journalism that’s more than fair. At the very least it will be good for a laugh.
A few years ago some group tried to develop a set of standards for blogs from the bottom up, as it were. Invariably, the whole thing came apart in under two weeks, IIRC.
That was it! It was the “Online Integrity” movement! I even blogged about the stupid thing. It was an attempt at online civility and protection of privacy, amongst other things. (I provide the dead link above just fucking because.) That was back in 2006.
I’m not even going to read the story for this new thing. It’s probably just another attempt at either rent-seeking or more wishful hope for censorship. (I notice a lot of that last bit going around lately.) If they want to put the genie back in the bottle, they had better come up with something better than a clusterfuck of a committee of shit-for-brains experts.
Well hell, when we all just a couple of communists, whos’s to say. Ms. Shuler, how do you like your tea?
That would be “Comrade Schuler”.
Dave’s not qualified to tell others how to do their job, he doesn’t have a J.D.
Provocateur! Counter-revolutionary! You are confusing mere bourgeois truth, concerned with sterile facts, with the genuine proletarian truth that advances the revolution.
I love it! Let’s ask for investigations – would it be the FCC?
Listen up, you people. I’m here at your service. (key up the Mighty Mouse music)
“Here I come to save the day……!!!”