Truth Trader

There’s no end to the back and forth bashing between bloggers and traditional journalists. Journalists have felt threatened by bloggers really because blogs are too immediate. That doesn’t fit with the process and techniques reporters are taught in journalism schools. With blogs everything they’ve spent years learning seems to go out the window. But really when you stop and think about it the techniques used in reporting as it’s done for print is entirely driven by the medium, the printing process. Newspapers are printed nightly. Reporters are subject to deadlines driven by the printing process. So the techniques they use are driven by the time factor.

There are these people we like to refer to as bloggers and this medium we refer to as blogs, but all we’ve really done is remove the constraints of the printing process, how often news can be printed, and constraints of delivering a physical printed paper, how often a paper can be distributed. It’s technological advancement no different than moving from the handwritten letter to email, or from the handwritten letter to the wired telephone, to the cordless, to the cell phone. Instead of winding yourself up in the 20′ stretchy cord while you talk, now we can talk to someone who’s not in front of us from virtually anywhere we want, though until recently that still wasn’t true for a long stretch of I-70 through Kansas.

It’s true though that blogs make it easy for people to do incredibly bad reporting, and not really report at all. But I’d also argue that the monopoly held so long by the print medium has allowed reporters to go relatively unchecked, except by those with a similar interest. The worst most common bad reporting technique is getting quotes to bolster the reporters view, while burying the other side of the story. This is so rampant it is just the norm and accepted. Seriously, no one even expects to get an honest, unbiased story out of a paper. Some blogs have done well, because the authors are truth seekers. Readers seek out these authors, whether they be bloggers or print journalists. They just want the truth.

A downside to the expediency of the blogging medium is fact checking, particular those widely read blogs that are expected to publish the latest news immediately and many times throughout the day. The model has become, write a couple paragraphs, add a picture (relevant or not, it doesn’t matter), publish, get feedback, then correct if necessary, but in a day the story will roll off into the archives anyway, so don’t be too concerned with accuracy and corrections. Now though, once something is published on a popular blog, there are hundreds of little sucker blogs waiting in the wings in hopes of having a little bit of the big blogs success. They are like the symbiotic relationship between sharks and the fish that latch on and clean it. Except that when the popular blog does shoddy work, it propagates out all over the world, even now into print media, and talk shows.

So we’ve got this crazy huckster guy out here in Colorado who says he’s got a tape that proves UFOs exist and he’s going to show it today. Well that’s certainly a tantalizing tale. The story goes from the local paper to the blogs and when a popular blog runs with it, then it’s all over the Internet, all day long. No exaggeration, “alien video” is Google’s 13th most searched term today, “Denver alien” hit 38th, “Jeff Peckman” 65th, “Jeff Peckman alien video” 84th, and “alien footage” 90th. Not until late in the day did anyone bother to report the fact that the guy is a huckster selling credit card gizmos that are supposed to put your chi back in order, and not for $10, but a whopping $150 a card! And then I suspect it was probably a commenter who pointed this out and got the record straight, rather than either a blogger or print journalist. Even the slightest bit of due diligence, just a few minutes effort would have made it clear what kind of sham man this guy was.

The funny thing is the guy, no doubt, did not anticipate getting picked up by the blogs and getting media attention worldwide. He’s in Boulder, which next to the Arizona desert, is hotbed for spiritual charlatans. It’s like Miami and penny stock scams. It’s the norm there. Now he’s probably going to be spending time in jail, with all the attention he’s drawn to his scams.