The DNC has offered a unique opportunity to bloggers, a select few of whom have been given press credentials (and legitimacy) to cover the convention. Although on the surface this seems to be a step forward (some would say a great leap) for the medium of blogging (or is it media?), it represents something of a step backwards for the rest of us.
There are, according to some reports, some 15,000 reporters covering the convention from around the world. If one attempts to identify the reliability and/or credibility of all 15,000 reporters, one finds a rather mammoth task. Toss in a few bloggers today--and more later, if the trend takes off--and we'll soon find ourselves moving away from established news media and toward a media of individuals via the blog.
Whereas traditional media has the advantage (some would say disadvantage) of credibility and established organization, with levels of responsibility and accountability, the blog suffers (enjoys) none of those editorial layers. Thus, while a news organization--CNN for instance--can assign an experienced political journalist to cover the DNC, who must file a story with an editor, work with a producer, and vie for airtime with other reporters and other stories, the blogger is his own writer, editor, and publisher, responsible to no one and nothing save himself and his political ideology.
Along with the advantage of immediacy (having no editorial process, the first draft is the final edition, and having no delivery medium but the Internet, a web connection and laptop are all that are needed to publish to the world within seconds), is the disadvantage of immediacy. Whereas a traditional news agency has established processes designed to minimize error and accurately represent a story, the blogger is free to disregard those checks and balances. If a blogger misrepresents (or just plain gets it wrong), there's no obligation to make restitution or retract. After all, a blogger's reputation is based more on voice than accuracy, and as his own publisher, the typical blogger is more than happy to make his blog present the strongest and most distinctive voice to readers. There is no accountability.
And therein lies the danger of the blog-cum-new-media. If people hold blogs to be the unreliable and biased medium that they are, people that read them will, with any luck, be more critical readers, looking for the bias that informs the opinions presented. But the tendency of most people is to be passive consumers of information. We google a keyword, read the first article in the results list, then consider ourselves properly and accurately informed, conveniently forgetting that the Internet isn't the latest edition of Encyclopedia Britannica (or, let's face it, even World Book) containing the collected wisdom of the ages in an easily searched form. Instead, the Internet is a global dumpster: one has to do some diving to get through the useless, irrelevant, or just-plain-wrong to find the good stuff.
The Internet is the democratization of information: because the Internet lacks nearly all the hurdles to publishing an opinion traditional media must overcome, anyone can say anything and have a fair chance of reaching an audience. That democratization of information makes some believe accessibility equals value. The blog sits firmly between those two very different ideas.
More than ever, readers cannot afford to passively ingest what's provided. If all information is now equal--from Matt Drudge to Voleuse, from nytimes.com to weeklyworldnews.com--now, more than ever, must we read carefully or be deceived, or worse still, be misinformed.