Blogs Got Hits and CBS Got a Black Eye!

Social networking’s many communications platforms are combining to create a new egalitarianism in news coverage, analysis, interpretation and reporting. At issue in the first part of the article is the legitimacy of blogs and their value or not. Quickly dismissed by traditional media with a patronizing tone, bloggers today are much more read and trusted than many of the traditional media producers, writers and newscasters are. To argue that there is not a vetting process for blogs and blogging is to miss the point. The issue is one of trust and transparency. Bloggers have no inherent financial gain for slanting the news, make their partisanship clear, and are aggressive about finding the essence, the truth of a story. Simply put, bloggers are more trusted, therefore more read, than traditional media in its many forms. Memogate, referred in the article, is clear proof that media luminaries including Dan Rather have no conviction about presenting as fact sources that have never been vetted. The irony of traditional media attacking bloggers yet one of their own allowing unvetted material to make it to 60 Minutes, potentially doing irreparable harm to a person’s livelihood, regardless of the victim’s political affiliation, makes blogging’s unvetted masses emerge all the more trustworthy. Memogate may have paradoxically propelled President George W. Bush to the White House as millions of Americans were enraged by the lack of ethics, and this clear violation of the public trust fueled his supporters with a renewed zeal.

The second segments of the article discuss access of the press to then Vice President Dick Cheney and the ability of traditional media to constrict dissenting voices. Clearly the ethics of restricting the New Your Times from enough access to the Administration, despite this papers’ renowned anti-Republican stance, is unethical. In keeping with the precepts of the Constitution and the ethics of democracy as defined as ideals by the United States, limiting access of dissenting voices just drives up the distrust of the public and the media. All of this tends to make entire branches of the government more insular, and in so doing they become less likely to concentrate on their service to other departments and citizens. It is unethical to limit access of dissenting voices from government-funded jets just for the comfort or convenience of the politician. Authenticity, transparency and trust are supposed to make the life of a politician, certainly a Vice President, continuously accountable. The Vice President is there to serve the people, not for the press and people to serve them. By in effect denying access, even if personally uncomfortable and even with traditional media they may not agree with, the Vice President is denying democracy what it needs to move forward. Truth and transparency and the fuel of democracy, to deny that through being highly selective about access is to limit its potential to keep a country’s politicians focused on serving rather than using their positions to serve themselves.