QandO

September 17, 2004

Old Media BS Filter
Posted by McQ

Reading through the comments to Jon's post about the blogosphere's triumphalism over Ra^thergate, I came across commenter Navteqie's take on the whole thing.

I think everyone misses the point of Blogs entirely.

The blogsphere is a giant B.S. filter of what is fed to us from the MSM. Instead of one reporter getting some information, then disseminating it to us through his biased mind, and then feeding it to us as he sees it, we have Blogs which consist of millions (?) of people that have more combined knowledge on the subjects the reporter is giving us and thoroughly disecting it to find out what the -REAL- truth is.

For the most part, I agree. While mildly crude characterization, its a very succinct description of what the blogosphere, on both sides, has done since its existance. "Fisking" is and has become an integral part of its daily bread, where columnists and opinion leaders in the old media have their version of events and their pontifications challenged. The intent? Filter out the nonsense and challenge the ideological conventional wisdom. Its usually done with facts, figures and logical arguments to counter the arguments of the pundit.

The same goes for more hard new stories, such as Ra^thergate. I won't bore you with a rehash of the details so readily known among those who frequent the blogosphere, but suffice it to say, the "BS Filter" was applied to a CBS "60 Minutes" story and CBS was found wanting.

In my estimation, this sort of function is both necessary and invaluable. What blogs don't do as a rule, is break news. Bloggers are net consumers of news. But what they provide is something new and something which has been lacking forever. The old media likes to talk about editorial "checks and balances". But those are internal checks and balances which may or may not render judgement that a story is both factual and unbiased as we've seen with Rathergate and my other such stories. It is difficult to see beyond institutional bias sometimes, and that is where bloggers perform a valuable "filtration" function. They provide an external version of "checks and balances".

Depending on who's ox is being gored, one or the other of the ideological sides of the blogosphere is going to look hard at the facts and figures of the old media's output. And its at that point where the strength of the blogosphere is found.

Michael Van Winkle, in a Tech Central Station article, points to how that strength manifests itself by citing the smiling ghost of F A Hayek. As Van Winkle points out, "Hayek's work centered on the effectiveness of spontaneous, decentralized organization". That effectiveness was proven last week, initiated by Powerline.

Hayek's work focused on how it is that complicated and reliable systems of cooperation come about without any centralized direction. When they do, they outperform systems of "command", systems that rely on central direction. Hayek was an economist and so his primary object of study was the market and how, seemingly counterintuitively, it can work without commands; and why it outperforms large scale centralized economies like the Soviet Union.

[...]

Hayek theorized that markets worked better primarily because of their ability to facilitate the use of 'on the spot' knowledge, knowledge that is very unique to a particular person or place.

With Powerline as the source of the questions about the CBS program and the authenticity of the memos, it solicited "on the spot" knowledge from its readers simply by asking those questions. The reaction, as we know was both spontaneous and phenomenal.

This traditional criticism of the internet has now been aimed at the blogosphere and is embodied by big journalists like Jonathan Klein who, while defending the CBS story to The Weekly Standard remarked, "You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing." Klein misses the point that it's not whether you can trust some guy in his pajamas, but whether you can trust a spontaneous system of thousands of guys in their pajamas trading information and imparting small, sometimes deceivingly insignificant, bits of information.

On reflection, Klein seem like a dinosaur who doesn't understand what the impact of that meteor means to him. As Van Winkle points out the "spontaneous system of thousands of guys in their pajamas trading information and imparting small, sometimes deceivingly insignificant, bits of information" created a synergy and self-correcting process which very quickly and convincingly destroyed CBS's claim that the memos were real.

The BS Filter characterization, despite its crudity, seems to be the best fit to me. I think it is very unlikely that bloggers will ever break news ... in fact I find it very unlikely they want too. Instead what bloggers bring to the game is an external and spontaneous system of filtration which has never existed with the old media. As Van Winkles concludes:

Big media isn't dying. It never will. The proof of this is that most bloggers get the grist for their mills from traditional big media sources. The impact of the blogosphere is to change the way the media does business. Five years from now, the news channels doing well will be the ones who take the blogosphere seriously, finding ways to use it to better its own reporting and analysis.

I agree. And those who embrace and use the new media in that capacity will most likely survive and thrive. And those, like CBS, who fight and denigrate it will go the way of the dinosaurs.

The BS filter is in place .... and it works.

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