KUDOS to our colleague Noemi Dado for her scintillating performance on Media in Focus on ANC with Cheche Lazaro this evening. She really scored a bullseye for the Bloggers and outshined veteran journalists Carlos Conde (International Herald Tribune) and Danilo Arao (Bulatlat) when she pointed out that it is the very active comment threads that come with real blogs, as well as the commentaries of other bloggers, that provide check and balance on what bloggers report or opine. Indeed, as a blogger myself, I am grateful when my Comment Thread participants point out blatant errors in my posts. I gladly acknowledge them. Our Mom Blogger surgically demolished the point that Carlos Conde had been hammering on throughout the show — that bloggers just shoot their mouth off, say whatever they want, and publish material that is “unvetted” — unlike of course the Main Stream Media which never publishes premeditated innuendo, erroneous news or outrageous views. (*wink*).
Noemi’s point about comment threads and fellow bloggers points out a very important and substantial difference between the Main Stream Media and the Blogosphere. Where traditional journalists rely on the wisdom of editors, we Bloggers rely on the wisdom of the crowd to restrain our passions, to check our facts and test our assertions. We are each other’s whetstones and limit switches, critics and devil’s advocates. We do things this way because it is much cheaper and more effective than setting up uneconomical, unecological multibillion peso newspaper empires, television and radio networks, whose principal goals are largely commercial and only partly journalistic. I daresay, that the speed of the comment thread makes for much faster “corrective but noneditorial” action in the blogosphere. The Blogosphere is far nimbler and more agile than newspapers, radio or television, and has corrigibility built into the interactive nature of the blogging practice itself.

Now of course, blogging has not abolished stupidity, avarice or bad manners. But no matter what criticisms are leveled at bloggers, much of it applies in equal if not greater measure to the Main Stream Media. Take the matter of errors–it is hardly worth noting that the main stream is arrogant enough to ignore their mistakes, or if errata are acknowledged, it’s there buried behind the obits. As for vetting, the main stream magnates could hardly care what they spew into the public sphere –as news, views or entertaintment — as long as it’s not libelous. That’s 99% of what passes for “vetting” in main stream journalism, in my opinion.

The bottom line is this. There are good bloggers and there are bad bloggers, just as there are journalists of both tendencies. But there is no doubt that the two tribes do things very differently. They use different tools, and as the vetting issue that Noemi has answered with “comment threads” has demonstrated, very different ways of “getting at the truth”. As the famous blogger Andrew Sullivan said in a piece that all bloggers should read, Why I Blog:

For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.

Good job, Noemi! The wisdom of editors vs. the wisdom of a blogging crowd.

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