A Blogger’s Wet Dream

By Carlos H. Conde

A blogger has been having this endless wet dream about blogging being a threat to the mainstream media. He exploits every mistakes of journalists and the mainstream press to promote himself and blogging as the alternative, as if blogging and journalism are competing against each other in the first place. Every chance he gets, he bamboozles the press. Which is fine; he’s a blogger and, like me, he’s entitled to make a fool of himself.

But when he twists what I said on ANC’ Media in Focus yesterday, I thought, “What is the problem with this guy? Did he apply as a columnist at the Inquirer or some other paper and got turned down, so that, when he discovered blogging, he vowed to get back at the mainstream press for the rebuke?”

Anyway, here are some of the comments in his post as well as my response to a few of them.

DJB on January 16th, 2009 12:58 am
Noemi,
An hour goes by fast on main stream television though doesn’t it? It’s a million bucks a minute. But in the blogsphere, we’ll spend days and many megabits per second of bandwidth in comments and further posts on all the issues you and the other guests mentioned oh so briefly on tv. Haha. Nature of the beasts. We and our readers will surely get to understand those issues more thoroughly here than whoever was flippin’ through the channels with the remote and heard Caloy Conde say Journalists could never become Bloggers at the same time and expect to do good journalism. So when you hit him between the eyes with the comment thread explanation, he actually said that he could not stand to have strangers telling him he was wrong or correcting an article he had written. That’s the kind of conceit or resistance to change that will lead to early retirement for certain types of journalists and extinction for certain types of media–as well as the vast majority of Bloggers!

jcc on January 16th, 2009 1:17 am
the highpriest has some points. there are some bloggers who shoot from the hips, but that’s the beauty of blogging. no censorship. you are free to show your talents or your stupidity. i would rather have the gems and the garbage side by side for the sake of variety.
jcc on January 16th, 2009 1:27 am
btw,
benign0 is one blogger i admire including DJB, Bencard, Jeg, and Leytenian. Of all the regular writers, Ding writes some beautiful articles, Primer is good, Nick is short but sharp, Jester-in-Exile probing, Caffeine will show you some sparks. I wish to read more from the community. But benign0 is right in his perception that we become petty when we create a mini-blog from someone’s blog.

ManuelV on January 16th, 2009 8:57 am
“he actually said that he could not stand to have strangers telling him he was wrong or correcting an article he had written.”
DJB, that’s not quite the way Caloy Conde put it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZFj6_Ge17c
At around the 2:35 point, I heard what sounded like: “I hate the idea of other people, you know, ah, ah, correct– no, not correcting me but owning ah… pointing out my mistake and then I ah… not doing it ah… myself not doing it…. so I have to… I have to come out with…” (or words to that effect)
The impression I got is that Caloy Conde does not want to rely only on the comments area to provide the balance. He wants to take a more active role in correcting his mistake, by coming out with something. I dunno… another blog post perhaps? He didn’t flesh out what he was trying to say.
But it didn’t come across as conceited to me.
(I didn’t quite catch any part where Caloy Conde say he couldn’t stand people telling him he was wrong or correcting an article he had written.)

ManuelV on January 16th, 2009 9:09 am
In the same video (00:03), Cheche Lazaro asks: “Credibility is not important to you, Noemi?”
And Noemi answers: “I didn’t realize that.”
I don’t know if Noemi did not realize that credibility is indeed not important to her afterall, or if she did not realize that credibility actually is important.
(In her blog, Noemi states that she does not give a hoot about credibility.)

caloy conde on January 16th, 2009 10:52 am
DJB: your erroneous recounting of what i said is precisely the kind of stuff that makes me want to stop blogging. (of course you’d say, yehey!) i rest my case.
also, nowhere did i say that i didn’t want the comment threads to correct my mistakes — what i was saying was, as manuel viloria here pointed out, is that i, as a blogger, need not wait for any commenters to point out mistakes before correcting them.
anyway, check this out so you and see if you can appreciate what i’m trying to say. http://www.pinoypress.net/2009/01/15/the-golf-war-and-the-perils-of-blogging

DJB on January 16th, 2009 10:57 am
ManuelV,
I recall the exchange. Noemi was being quite candid about a common experience of many bloggers: they don’t blog to maintain some kind of journalistic stature like ABSCBN or PDI or DZMM. They are in some sense just opinionators, but different even than MSM pundits.
When she said she didn’t care about “credibility” that was when she was being a “Mom Blogger” as she said, writing about things she is an expert on: her husband, her children, herself.
Then when she got embroiled in the golf fracas, suddenly all the credibility she had built up as a Mom Blogger was put to to the test in a completely unfamiliar situation. But of course, being a basically honest blogger, she did just “shoot her mouth off” — but with the normal consciousness that her comment thread and other bloggers would see her published stuff and it would stand as a statement of her opinion or feeling at that point in time.
I think most bloggers–honest bloggers anyway–just assume that if they are speaking their mind with candor and openness so why do they need some editor to watch own for the owners interests in THEIR thoughts?
It really goes back to the fundamental cost of doing business in the MSM vs. blogging. It COSTS a ton of money to publish or broadcast anything, which is part of the reason for the “vetting” which is sold as journalistic integrity.
What a laugh. The MSM is just as full of it as the Blogosphere, except our B.S. costs the economy and the environment far less. That very low cost of transacting memes is revolutionary. It has silenced the Voice of Omniscience that used to belong exclusively to the MSM.
No more! No more! Ordinary citizens will be heard. We’ll pay for pros to gather the news, but our views can and will stand in competition with any commercial pundit. Any day. Any night. Anywhere.
The Blogosphere is a meritocracy of ideas, an aristocracy of meme-makers.

Pipe on January 16th, 2009 11:12 am
Thanks for the links to the show, I
ll try to give it a look-see. just reading the article and some of the comments though, I do have a few thoughts I’d like to share:
* On the influence of blogs vs. newspapers: I think focusing on the medium in which content is distributed is not really a good way to measure the influence a particular news item might have. I think what really matters is (1) the content/substance of the item itself; and (2) how widely disseminated that item becomes. An article in the Inquirer – or, hell, in the New York Times – about the winner of a dogshow can hardly be said to be influential simply because of the medium it is expressed in. Likewise the best news item in the world, whether in print or on the web, won’t have very much importance if people don’t talk about it.
Also, if I may ask one question to Mr. Caloy as well: sir, would not a statement be as subject to “erroneous recounting” if it were made in any public medium? And would these “erroneous recountings” be not similarly heinous whether they were recounted through blogs, print, or word of mouth? Allegations of “misquoting” and “being taken out of context” are probably as old as gossip itself.

caloy conde on January 16th, 2009 11:34 am
hi pipe: point taken, although my point was more on the point that, in DJB’s case, he was shooting his mouth off (us many of us do) at my expense. do journalists in the mainstream press commit “erroneous recountings”? of course! but for people like DJB to exploit the shortcomings of journalists or the press to promote himself as the alternative AND THEN commit the very thing he rues… (irony is not the word i’m inclined to use.)

DJB on January 16th, 2009 11:53 am
Caloy,
Any distortion is unintentional. But it is impossible to keep up with what every journalist or blogger has posted or published somewhere, even the IHT. What I saw was an hour on Cheche Lazaro’s show and I heard you say some things such as that Journalists cannot be Bloggers and expect to do a good job. I thought that characteristically sanctimonious and simply wrong. (Just ask Larry King or Anderson Cooper.) I admit this was probably just a snapshot of your own evolving thoughts and experience, which we all appreciate of course, but I am sick and tired of people in the MSM accusing Bloggers of splinters in their eye as they ignore the logs in their own. I need not embarrass you with a litany of journalism’s own follies and jollies.
But I hope you acknowledge that Noemi has effecively answered the tendentiously repeated charge of a lack of “vetting” and “verification” in the Blogosphere that the MSM beats its chest with. (For some reason it is a favorite of Old Leftists who’ve carved out a niche in the MSM, but I’m sure this doesn’t pertain to you.)
Still, it is an entirely different mechanism that “corrects” blogs, yet it can be every bit as effective and indeed “faster” and more “transparent” than what the MSM can do because “vetting” is not automatic, but discretionary.
I guess it is in effect in the vetting process that whatever private interest the owners and proprietors of commercial mass media are snuck in and promoted under the cover of “editorial policy.”
Thus, in both the production of the news and views, and in the manner they are redacted and reacted to, there is a huge difference between the Blogosphere and the traditional old media, especially newspapers. Even when they are online, they bring with them the baggage of Crony Capitalism masquerading as Journalism.
So I commend your decision not to jump the “species barrier” if indeed you are uncomfortable with interactivity, or find it beneath you, who are vetted by editors and restrained by a Code of Ethics.
You realize of course that it is precisely this allegedly vetted, quality controlled material that becomes grist for the Bloggers Mill.
Perhaps this analogy will help:
The Blogosphere is the Comment Thread of the MSM. (A tale that wags the god).

caloy conde on January 16th, 2009 12:14 pm
DJB: i have no debate with you on the nature of the blogosphere. i do agree with the comment-thread analogy. which brings me to my point: perhaps we should stop this nonsense about blogging as the new journalism or the one that will defeat MSM. blogging and journalism are two different animals, with different sets of values, etc. and society needs BOTH of them. put another way, and as i shall explain more in a post on pinoypress.net soon, the answer to bad journalism is good journalism, not blogging.
ps: journalists are not vetted by editors. it would be impossible for an editor who sits in his cubicle all day to know whether every single fact or information that his reporters gathered is true. the editor’s job is to make sure that reporters talked to the right sources, adhered to the objective process of reporting, got all sides and got them accurately. the editor’s job is to make sure that reporters do not just shoot their mouths off without basis. if this process is objectionable to you so much so that you prefer a medium that does away with all that, good luck.
and the code of ethics that you seem to disdain? it’s there for a reason, just as there was a reason your momma whipped you up as a boy: so you’d be nice to other people.