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MediaBotch
By Steven | September 26, 2010
This week’s MediaWatch show on Radio NZ is billed like this:
Mediawatch looks at the impact of the ‘new media’ on the old. Can online amateurs really replace the professional journalism of today? Is it already happening? And if so – what effect is it having on standards?
This promised to be interesting – particularly since blogger Andrew Geddis at Pundit last week identified a humiliating blunder in the prisoners-votes-disqualification bill, a stuff-up that was then picked up by the mainstream media. A nice topical demonstration of the worth of the blogosphere, you might think. A good illustration of the way some expert bloggers are adding to the national conversation. An example of online amateurs and professional journalists working in sync.
Of course that’s not all we’ve heard from Geddis in the last couple of weeks. He and Dean Knight exposed the staggering width of the Canterbury Earthquake Response and Recovery Act – a much more significant issue, and one that the professional journalists have by and large dropped the ball on. That was a case of bloggers’ standards plainly rising above those of the mainstream media.
But MediaWatch didn’t mention those stories at all. Apart from a vague reference to stories broken by blogger David Farrar (whose name MediaWatch pronounced incorrectly), there was no discussion of the range of stories and analysis (often ahead of the MSM, often more penetrating, and sometimes even more ethical) on our leading blogs. Instead, the focus was on WhaleOil (though there was time for a gratuitous swipe at Farrar for a minor slip-up that wasn’t even on his blog). The MediaWatch folk made the sensible point that Mr Oil’s ethics leave something to be desired, and the MSM could stand to be a little less credulous about his posts. But this was hardly advancing the broad issue the programme had raised.
This is not to say that the blogosphere isn’t largely full of tripe and blather. It’s to say that this of all weeks offered a terrific illustration of the virtues of the blogosphere. Did MediaWatch not notice? I’m not sure this shows up the professional journalists at MediaWatch in a particularly glowing light.
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