Bloggers needed to police media

Recently, I have heard and read many traditional reporters complaining about bloggers. "They are not real reporters," they say. "They sit at home and comment on things with no real journalistic skills or techniques applied to their writing."

No doubt that is true, to some extent. But it also seems true that bloggers are increasingly playing the policing role in society that the media was intended to play.

As the "fourth branch of government" the media's job was to monitor government officials and call them on the carpet for their activities. Watergate is a classic example, but there are hundreds of others, as print, radio and television journalists worked to critically cover policy decisions and uncover corruption, lies and other misdeeds.

Scanning the current media world, however, it is obvious the media no longer plays this role. Media consolidation means there are fewer diverse outlets investigating and collecting news. And the media outlets that remain are all part of global corporations whose primary goal is to make money, not create quality news. So, news staffs are being cut and Britney Spears gets more coverage than Osama Bin Laden.

In addition, the country's most prominent journalists are more interested in creating their own celebrity than in creating quality journalism. The supposed top dog of the current campaign season, Tim Russert, is a shabby representative of hard-core journalism. He asks obvious questions, makes obvious observations and gets praised for it.

The reporter-as-celebrity phenomenon was nakedly exposed in the wake of the Don Imus episode, when all the supposed journalists who appeared regularly on his show found themselves backpeddling when Imus finally stuck his foot a little too far down his throat to successfully extract it. The media personalities were not appearing on his show to create great journalism; they appeared to further their celebrity.

The media is also trying to insert itself into the Democratic presidential nomination contest in an unprecedented way. First they pronounced Clinton dead in the water, then they said she had "found her voice," then they lavished praise on Obama and it took a Saturday Night Live skit - that's right, Saturday Night Live, that bastions of journalism - to slap the media from its Obama adoration. Then, to appear objective, they turned on Obama and fed on the Rev. Wright controversy. Finally, they fought to be the first to declare Clinton down for the count. Russert took home the honor by boldly(?) and solemnly proclaiming after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, "We now know who the Democratic nominee will be." A Walter Cronkite moment it was not.

Go to the news web sites for CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC or ABC. They all cover the same stories in the same way. Where is the diversity? The 24-hour news cycle has not given us more news; it's given us the same news over and over and over again.

And so there are the bloggers. Dan Rather, Cronkite's pompous and unworthy successor, felt the wrath of a real watchdog when the blogosphere combined forces to call him on the carpet for his bogus story on Bush's military service.

The traditional media is part of The Machine, The Man - together with the sports leagues, politicians, business barons and multinational corporations they are supposed to cover. They are the haves, attending the same power parties, trying to sell their books, fighting for the same screen time as everyone else.

Do I rely on bloggers for news? No. Do I rely on them for insightful analysis? Hardly ever.

But they provide one thing the traditional media has lost - honest cynicism. They hold people accountable, including the traditional media, when they spot a phony. Sometimes to the extreme and too often with vulgarity. But it is a function this country needs, as the watchdog function only works when it is rooted in the people. The traditional media no longer fits that description.