Last Train To Low-Down

July 13th, 2008 at 09:02am Mitch Mulhall 171

After an exchange with the Con Man in CON GAMES: Code Friedman (see comments 1, 2, and 4) the autopsy declared complete by the likes of Jay Rosen and others doesn’t really mean the question of journalism versus blogging is teats-up. To the contrary, the strife between journalism and blogging is quite alive.

The blogger’s voice isn’t merely OK, it more than OK, and deservedly so. A journalism degree can be a legitimate basis for credence. It can also be the warm, turgid fluid in a spittoon. That’s equally true for any academic discipline you toss into the ring.

Yet journalists presume a mantle of authority based on an intellectual decorum they think most people would rather not bother with—a kind of heavy-lifting the intellectually unwashed would never attempt, a kind of strain intellectual-equals would rather avoid. In short, I contend journalists operate under the unwarranted conceit that they conduct important analyses the masses can’t be bothered with.

Case in point, the Killian documents, submitted on 60 Minutes Wednesday (September 4, 2004) by then-host Dan Rather to impugn President Bush’s National Service Record. Blogger Charles Foster Johnson took a look at the documents and realized that the typographical qualities—the leading, kerning, and superscripting—could not have been accomplished by any typewriter contemporaneous with Bush’s military service, c. 1973. Johnson created an animated .gif that plotted the scanned image of the Killian document over a Microsoft Word generated copy. The result? Don’t think for a moment that having a journalism degree makes you implicitly more diligent or thoughtful than the rest of humanity. I’d implore you to ask Dan Rather about this, but I’m fairly certain his answer would be a stalwart defense of Killian document validity. Consider instead Mr. Rather’s relevance today.

I think the central problem of both journalists and bloggers alike—and on this point I think Michael and I may agree—is the unfortunate pull to believe your own bullshit.

Cheers,

Entry Filed under: Glenwood Springs, Aspen, People, Television