You own a printing press: Of blogs and editorial balance

By Chris Meadows

Over on TechDirt, Mike Masnick writes an editorial blog post in which he talks about companies’ attempts to get “equal time” when blogs cover them. He raises an interesting question which is one that journalists and bloggers alike should be thinking about in this new Age of the Blog.

Masnick’s post immediately concerns itself with a piece he wrote earlier concerning YouTube, and the request by a Google public relations person (Google owns YouTube) to insert a PR response into Masnick’s original story. Masnick feels this is “ridiculous,” and suggests that “if the PR folks have something to say, they’re free to take it up in our comments.”

He then brings up a dispute TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington had with The Video Professor, a company that sells instructional DVDs. Arrington called The Video Professor a scam, and the Professor complained—first to TechCrunch, then to the Washington Post who syndicates them after Arrington refused to bend. (The Post stood by Arrington.)

It may be good to see an obviously bad-acting company get its comeuppance. On the other hand, this does bring up the matter of journalistic ethics as it applies to blogs. After all, regular newspapers would not get away with combining editorialism and journalism so freely.

He Who Owns the Press Has the Freedom

Ethics in journalism has been around for about as long as journalism has. Before the dawn of the Internet age, it was needed. Printing presses were big investments, and their power to disseminate information was in the hands of just a few people.

The idea that both sides of a story should be represented—which largely came to prominence in the modern era—was a reaction against the power of those people to have their own way. Facts and opinion should be kept separate, with different sections devoted to each one to help readers tell them apart.

To be sure, press owners had their own way a lot, even with those ethics. Some hold that the main reason marijuana was outlawed was that paper magnate William Randolph Hearst disliked the Mexicans who were its biggest users, and hemp-based paper threatened his big investment in the timber industry.

And if David Rothman finds the Associated Press’s tactics deplorable now, Ars Technica has a long article detailing the sordid history of the AP’s stranglehold on the telegraph—the “Victorian Internet”—in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

An Outdated Doctrine

But this has changed with the development of electronic media. Even the FCC no longer insists on equal time for political candidates; the “Fairness Doctrine” was abolished in 1987 and has resisted all attempts thus far to bring it back.

Part of the reason is that thanks to the Internet, now everyone has “his own printing press”. As Masnick points out, many blogs have comment sections where opposing views can be heard. If not, it only takes a few minutes to start a blog, which will be indexed by Google within a few days—or Google Sidewiki will allow leaving comments even on blogs that do not otherwise allow them.

On the other hand, many people do not bother to read the comments to the article—especially on sites like Slashdot, where comments are generally considered to be about 95% noise. And for those entities that are not major corporate presences on the web, even being indexed in Google is no guarantee that people will see your response.

Blogs Aren’t Newspapers

And bloggers aren’t professional journalists, when you get right down to it. (At least, most aren’t.) They don’t have any sort of governing body to force a code of ethics on them. (Unless you count the FTC’s insistence on regulating disclosure of freebies, but that is more a regulation of trade than of blogging.) They are people with opinions, exercising their First Amendment (or equivalent in their native country, if any) rights.

Even “professional” blogs like TechDirt and TechCrunch—and, for that matter, TeleRead—are written in a more breezy editorial style—making no bones about trying to be “fair and balanced”. If I think Amazon is spitting in the face of everyone who has ever bought a Mobipocket e-book, I will say so. If they don’t like it, they have venues to comment on it themselves (including our comments).

In fact, this is happening now with the subject of another TechCrunch story—TechCrunch’s ex-partner on the failed CrunchPad project. The CEO of Fusion Garage will be holding a press conference to talk about the device, and perhaps present their side of the story now that Arrington has had his own say.

This sort of thing is what people expect from blogs, because that’s the way they’ve always been. And there is not necessarily anything wrong with that.

The problem is that people are now more than ever getting their “news” from blogs and other opinion-based reporting sources—simply because there are more of them now, and they are easier to find, than ever. This means that people are more free than ever to select only sources of information that feed their own biases and prejudices. For example, it is the rare global warming skeptic who reads global warming believer sites (and vice versa).

Of course, this is not something that requiring both sides of the issue to be presented could solve; mainstream media still continues to do this out of custom but that does not prevent liberals and conservatives alike from claiming bias.

This is a problem with no clear solution—I’m certainly not going to claim that requiring bloggers to prevent more than one point of view would make them better news sources. But like so many such problems, it is good to discuss it, to remain aware of it.

Blogs—especially the more popular ones—have the power to shape a lot of opinions. Perhaps we should all think more about how they do that.