Whilst looking for info on today’s All Things Considered (who, oddly enough are hosting the aforementioned The Decemberists), I happened to notice an article by NPR’s Ombudsman Jeffrey A. Dvorkin entitled “When Those Pesky Blogs Undermine NPR News“. The crux of the story is in regards to a Defense Department PDF obtained and posted by NPR detailing the unfortunate death of Italian agent Nicola Calipari due to US fire at a checkpoint in Iraq. Some “bloggers” downloaded this PDF, and using some publically known unredacting techniques, released a “clean” version of the document to the internet at large. The information revealed, among other things, the US service personnel involved in the shooting.

In light of that fiasco, it is understandable for Ombudsman Dvorkin to take offsense. That aside, Dvorkin seems, with his occassionally dismissive remarks regarding the “blogosphere” to have some thinly veiled contempt for bloggers and “amoral place with few rules” that they habitate. That underlying current is what originally seeded my interest in his column, and upon further research it would seem that he has just recently provided a “mea culpa” on the subject of blogs. So, perhaps my hunch was right. But, that salacious point is not really the reason I’m writing.

I think Dvorkin’s underlying (though admirably publically displayed) contempt/concern for bloggers’ journalistic meddle is understandable from someone in his position. However, I do believe that bloggers and their “misbehavior” are a necessary evil. For each unredacted piece of information that might “endanger lives”, there are a handful of blog entries with substantive opinion and fact that would not have come to light save for this “lawless West” (my words, not his). It’s not as black and white or as unchangeable as some may think.

The Internet, and the “blogosphere” as sub-universe is a frightfully organic beast by its very design, so Dvorkin’s statement that “bloggers tend not to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact” is, I believe, uncharacteristically one-sided. For every loud, obnoxious, factsimile-spewing blogger, there is an equal and opposite blogger that does value the same journalistic ethics that he stands for. Being a living, breathing organism, the Internet does not just create new ideas, but also ingests them as well. The blogosphere has taken a cue from the sound-and-fury news channels of the world and makes blogs in that image. I imagine that anti-drug commercial from the 80s with the kid saying to his coked-up father “I learned it from watching you!”.

In the end of Dvorkin’s article, he concedes that the mainstream media may be “the King Canutes of latter-day media, hoping that we can order the tide to recede at our command”. I don’t think you can order this tide to recede, necessarily, but I do think that you can certainly make it work for you. I applaud Dvorkin for his frank remarks regarding the interaction between blogs and the mainstream media, but I truly hope they realize that the blogosphere is what you make it. After all, it isn’t a big machine sitting in a bunker 30 floors below sea-level — it’s people like you, me, Dvorkin and Drudge.

Also, just as an aside — Dvorkin reported back in January on emails received by NPR between mid-October 2004 and Janunary 2005, giving tallies by subject. “Criticisms of NPR as too leftwing”: 210. “Critiques that NPR is too rightwing”: 484. Heh.