0

By David Rothman

SockpuppetsWould the world be better off if we didn’t have such a small group of like-minded countries, er, companies, dominating so much of the news business? Ben Vershbow raises that question about the AP-Reuters duopoly in the international area, and it’s a legitimate one, along with other pesky issues.

The media are far, far wimpier than in my days as an investigative reporter, and the AP-Reuters duopoly aggravates the problem. I’d love to know, for example, the full story of John Edwards‘s relationship with copyright lobbyists and with Hollywood, the source of at least $900K in contributions for his PAC at a crucial time. Good luck, eh?

The New Republic’s sock puppet

Still, to the credit of the mass media, some healthy self-policing can take place on occasion. In a New York Times article by Tom Zeller, you can read how Lee Siegel, a veteran New Republic editor, debated himself—or, to be exact, his sock puppet, the online phantom he created for an NR blog. Clarification: a suspended editor. Another Times piece from David Carr overlaps somewhat. A revealing snippet in the latter article could just as well apply someday to the world of interactive books.

Ezra Klein, a writer for The American Prospect and a blogger who seemed to touch a raw nerve in Mr. Siegel (who used his Sprezzatura sock puppet to label Mr. Klein “an awful suck-up” whose writing “is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition”) said that the direct response mechanism that many readers find so bracing has left many mainstream writers feeling threatened.

“There is a certain kind of person who is well suited to the moment,” he said. “The skill set now include[s] how tough your skin is. People have to be accountable for what they write and that is not a bad thing. It is a good thing for magazines, the kind of countervailing power that they have needed for a long time.”

Exactly! In fact, that’s especially true if you apply the number one criterion for judging most nonfiction—not the quality of the prose, but the percentage of sheer fact. Readers, as has been said here and elsewhere before, can also be great editors. They can sharpen your existing arguments and tell you when you’re full of it. Why should this concept apply only to articles? I can’t wait for appropriate e-books to be as interactive as blogs, so that core texts can reflect the insights and, yes, the corrections from readers.

Housekeeping note: I’ll be out part of this morning. The list of this past week’s TeleBlog headlines will come later today or tonight.

 
0