In Blogs We (Wrongly) Trust - Software Development Times On The Web

In Blogs We (Wrongly) Trust
By David Rubinstein

June 15, 2006 — One recent night, I caught a snippet of NBC’s “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” television program. One of his guests was the network’s news anchor, Brian Williams, who was describing his newfound fascination with Apple’s iPod music player.

Williams described how he’d asked a co-worker what he was listening to on his iPod. The co-worker replied it was a podcast of a program he couldn’t listen to earlier—and added that it would be cool if you could actually hear the podcast live as it was happening. Williams, going for the laugh on the comedy talk show, retorted, “Yes, I think they call that radio!”

The news anchor commented on the irony: Even as folks spend all kinds of money on 65-inch plasma screen televisions for their home theater systems, they watch shows on their 2 1/2-inch iPod screens. He said the same co-worker couldn’t wait until he could watch video on his iPod as it was happening. “That’s called television,” Williams noted wryly.

It was a good-natured exchange about the obsessive nature of Americans and their gadgets, but Williams failed to touch on the broader point here.

Before the Internet and wireless gadgets, the only way to reach large audiences was through the mass media—radio, television and newspapers.

Decades ago, to get your message across unfiltered, companies bought ads in those media. But if you didn’t have the money to buy ads—perhaps you’re an environmental group seeking to get the word out about the shrinking rain forests, or a candidate for political office trying to make a point about your record—you had to go through editors, who would decide if your story was worthy of wide distribution, and if so, how much of it they could fit into a printed news story or a timed television piece. Rarely was an organization’s or individual’s news announcement run verbatim. More often than not, news releases were tossed aside.

Technology has changed all that. Now, unfiltered news announcements can be posted in full on a corporate or charitable organization’s Web site. Garage musicians can record their songs, upload them onto a computer, and distribute them on peer-to-peer networks. Would-be pundits can write to their hearts’ content—space is no object in the blogosphere.

While the original benefit of cell phones, handheld devices and iPods was to be able to take information with you, the benefit of Web 2.0—with RSS, wikis and tagging—has been to put the power of a mass medium into the hands of the masses. This is both revolutionary and potentially catastrophic.

For every newspaper columnist like George Will or veteran television anchor like Walter Cronkite, respected journalists who by dint of their years in their trades gained public trust, there are new bloggers and videocast hosts about whom we know very little. Yet more and more, people are trusting their words as the unbiased truth, as we would Will’s or Cronkite’s, simply because the bloggers and podcasters now have access to the same delivery mechanisms as the old-school journalists. I guess people think that because they can read Bob Woodward online, or in his blog, that by definition, anyone that writes online or in a blog has the credibility of Bob Woodward.

Or perhaps the bigger issue is that readers and television viewers have no faith that what the traditional media are bringing them is the unbiased truth, so that in their minds, there is no difference between George Will and a blogger. If that’s the case, then I fear for the very future of this society—a future in which corrupt businesspeople and government officials go unchecked because true investigative reporting and journalism is lost in a sea of opinionated, facts-be-damned, “look at me!” blogging and videocasting. This, to me, is the biggest job facing publishers—regaining the public’s confidence and trust that the information they are being given is reliable, accurate and impartial.

Meanwhile, encyclopedia publishers employ a veritable army of fact-checkers to ensure the information they put out is accurate. Does Wikipedia use the same standard, or does it assume that the public at large is the army of fact-checkers, who jump in and correct errors they find? Well, what happens if the day I look something up is the day before someone with better knowledge corrects the very entry I relied on the day before? Who’s standing at the gate before this information gets disseminated over the Internet?

Newspaper and magazine publishers fear this new world. How do we get people to get off the information superhighway at our rest stop, when there is so much traffic and noise out there? Actually, it’s a very simple answer. People want information they can trust, that they can rely on as being accurate and impartial. As more unnamed, untrustworthy writers enter the blogosphere, they will actually drive readers back to the traditional publishing sites, where the George Wills and Maureen Dowds—and in our industry the Alan Zeichicks, Peter Coffees and Larry O’Briens—have proven, over years of reporting and analysis, that they are the names you can trust.

David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.

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