Glenn Reynolds - Wrong Again

The Bucks County Courier Times carried this sidebar piece to the whole Mark Foley “Page-Gate” mess today (and I suppose automatically attaching the “Gate” suffix to this is a bit trite…my apologies).

This came from the Scripps-Howard News Service – I haven’t been able to find it online yet.

WASHINGTON – ABC News was the first traditional media outlet to report explicit instant messages between former Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL, and under-aged congressional pages, but an Internet blog broke the story almost a week earlier.

The Stop Sex Predators Now blog posted suggestive Emails about Foley on September 24th, after several earlier posts charging him with inappropriate conduct.

No, the Emails weren’t about Foley – they were sent by Foley; a whole different matter. Also, the Courier Times printed the wrong URL for the Stop Sex Predators Now blog; you can link to it here. Finally, I have not yet been able to find any posts from the site about Foley prior to 9/24.

The blog’s role in exposing the controversy raises questions that traditional journalists and experts have been asking about the relationship between blogs and the Fourth Estate.

A healthy dialogue, to be sure, though it’s a shame that it took a story like this to make that happen.

Few bloggers have broken national stories.

Really? I regularly hear about major news stories from Atrios, The Daily Kos or HuffPo before I hear about them from the Inquirer or the Courier Times. It’s partly the immediacy of the medium I realize, but I would argue that it’s the nature of the reporting also, which is generally quite accurate (and include Josh Marshall in that group, by the way).

Matt Drudge was the first to report about Monica Lewinsky in 1998, and FreeRepublic.com discredited documents that CBS used in a 2004 story about President Bush’s military service.

Of course, this being the Courier Times, they obviously can only attribute right-wing freeper sites, since anything to do with liberals/progressives/Democrats/whatever effectively doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned…and for the thousandth time, by the way, just because there were some questions about the documents from Bill Burkett that Dan Rather used in his report doesn’t mean that the report itself was automatically wrong.

Glenn Reynolds, who created the blog Instapundit.com in August 2001, said the Foley controversy shows that mainstream media outlets are becoming increasingly willing to look for stories on blogs.

“It’s the media playing catch-up,” he said, adding that blogs, where people frequently post anonymous comments, are ideal for leaking political information.

Reynolds, who is also a law professor at the University of Tennessee, said the blogspot blog, which is only about 2 months old, acted less as a watchdog and more as a dumping ground for scandalous information.

I don’t quite understand why that is supposed to be a negative comment. Who cares about what Stop Sex Predators Now was supposed to be originally? The point is that it ended up receiving the Foley information before anyone else.

“The odds that this was put together by a political operation seems likely,” he said.

Oh, please. Which political party then, Perfesser? The Democrats? Then why would the site contain information on Democrat Gary Condit and the controversy surrounding him and disappeared (and later found murdered) intern Chandra Levy?

Admit that you don’t know who is behind it and whether or not the site has a stated partisan purpose and let’s move on, OK?

Because bloggers operate as individuals instead of employees as traditional news organizations, they don’t necessarily abide by journalistic standards of accuracy and fairness.

True, but then again, I can regularly count on the Bucks County Courier Times to publish a letter or Guest Opinion questioning whether or not Patrick Murphy is a faithful Catholic; the paper’s stated editorial policy on campaign letters is that they should not be personal attacks, which is really funny when you read these screeds against Patrick such as the most recent hack job by this lawyer named Gregory Sullivan a few weeks ago.

And while we’re on the subject, I hereby state that the next time I see a letter attacking Patrick for how he practices his faith, I’m going to write to the Courier Times editorial board and demand to know how many times Mike Fitzpatrick has attended mass during this campaign and received the sacraments of communion and reconciliation. After all, fair is fair.

But to back up a bit, I should point out, again, that Reynolds is cited here as the All Knowing Blogging Guru For All Time Above All Else by the traditional media (kind of funny to read his condescending attitude towards people who want to actually hear what he has to say anyway).

However, to be fair, I should point out that if I ever heard of Reynolds, Duncan Black, Markos Moulitsas or any other longtime, big hit blogger giving some kind of a seminar on the business of blogging and ideas on technical or design issues that must be addressed to grow a blog and propagate it as much as possible (as well as legal issues, which of course is Reynolds’ specialty), I would do all I could to attend because I know I would learn a lot.

But when it comes to editorial policy or journalistic issues, I’d want to get as far away from Reynolds as I could (and I think the Stop Sex Predators blog, whatever the intentions of the proprietor or its sense of journalistic ethics, should be commended and not impugned).