Bloggers - Proud to Not be Journalists

Last week USA Today came out with articles about bloggers attending the respective national conventions. A journalism professor at the University of Missouri (a highly ranked journalism school) sneered that bloggers are not real journalist and should not get passes to the conventions.

Athenae, one of the four horsemen of the blogtopolypse in Atrios absence, pithily responded, "well pardon us for living".

Of course, the sneering professor is missing something entirely.

Yes, it is true that most of us who blog are not journalists. As for DeDurkheim and me, we are both professionals in different fields. I cannot divulge what those professions are, except too tell you if Robert Novak outed me through the power of his hypnotic teeth, it would be a crime against banality.

We do not blog because we are journalists, we blog because we are interested. We are well-educated, active people, who use the blog as an outlet to make use of those educations for which we are so nobly, and deeply, indebted. While we make our living doing something else, we blog in order to give us an outlet for expression. I do not know about you readers, but in my day to day job I don't get to put wiseass captions on stupid pictures and dammit, somebody needs to!

I make no claim of being a journalist. So, up yours professor.

There are, of course, some journalists on the blogosphere. Josh Marshall, and Billmon are examples on the left, and there are some on the right. There may be a slant, but they are journalists.

The thing that really annoys me with the Professor's statement is that a number of blogs are from those employed in the media, but to whom the title "journalist" is just as invalid as it is to me.

These are the plethora of Editorialists who are also bloggers. An editorial writer is not a journalist, there is no objective stance in Andrew Sullivan, the gang at National Review, nor Michelle Malkin, etc. They do not act as journalists, they are editorial writers, polemicists.

What is the blogosphere but the world's largest editorial page, and we at Rising Hegemon (or at any number of blogs) are just as qualified and talented at what we do (and in some cases more) than any of the listed editorialists.

Blogs are also great for one other thing.

As with the post below about the Daily Show winning an award over so-called legitimate broadcast networks, blogs serve as a decent check for the well informed on the editorial choices of broadcast networks. For example:

I'm sure the broadcast media is all over the Sandy Berger story -- but what of Allawi accused of murders; Bush's lies on mobile labs; the over-reporting of mass graves; rape of children allowed at Abu Ghraib, etc.?

You found out those stories...through valid news links, from blogs.

And how many times has a blogger retrieved something from the "memory hole" for you to expose the hypocrisy or deceit of a policy-maker? Something that so-called journalist are just terrible at doing.

I am quite happy to not be a journalist, but rather, a mere blogger.