The Watchdogs of the Watchdogs
In chapter 3 of “We the Media,” Gillmor highlights one way that the Internet has already made journalism better; bloggers and other citizens can act as the watchdogs of the watchdogs of democracy. To summarize (later in the book) Gillmor quotes early blogger Ken Layne: “We can Fact Check your ass,” (187).
Let me juxtapose two bits of journalistic introspection to show how the Internet can act as a better check on journalists than more traditional methods like Ombudsmen. The first is the recent tiff at the speech their Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse gave upon receiving the 2006 Radcliffe Institute Medal. Months after the speech, NPR picked up on a few choice tidbits including: “Greenhouse went on to charge that since then, the U.S. government had ‘turned its energy and attention away from upholding the rule of law and toward creating law-free zones at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Haditha and other places around the world — [such as] the U.S. Congress.’” and “She also observed a ’sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism. To say that these last few years have been dispiriting is an understatement.’” After the NPR piece, the Times’ Public Editor Byron E. Calame wrote a piece that suggested Greenhouse “stepped across that line” between holding personal opinions and expressing them publicly. Four months after her speech, Greenhouse got a slap on the wrist for a breach of the Times’ code of ethics.
On September 8, 2004, at 8 p.m. PST, Dan Rather aired a story questioning the veracity of President Bush’s National Guard Service claims. Just 59 minutes and 43 seconds later, a citizen-poster (non-professional journalist) on Freerepublic.com – a conservative blog – known only as “Buckhead” asserted that the memos Rather based his story on were fakes. He said: “In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts. The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. I am saying that these documents are forgeries, run through a copier for 15 generations to make them look old. This should be pursued aggressively.” Bloggers, including those at Rathergate.com did just that. By September 13th, a New York Times column ran under the headline: “Those Discredited Memos.” Rather resigned in disgrace.
Granted, Greenhouse’s misdeeds were much less egregious than basing a story on forgeries, however the lag time on the New York Times’ feedback loop was extraordinarily long. When massive numbers of people get involved in a news story, which the Internet can facilitate, journalists can be “scrutinized the way [they] scrutinize others,” (62). This type of scrutiny can only help make our reporting more accurate.