That’s a scary thought. And it’s a narrative I try to keep in the closet, because I never agreed to become a journalist, and I have maintained — often vehemently — that I am not one. However, blogger Michael Costello (linked by Glenn Reynolds yesterday for saying “If The Fu Hsits”) discovered that as a blogger he used the same process that conventional journalists do:
I had my narrative in anticipation of facts that I could mold to fit it.. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to make them up. They were just buried in history. I only needed to dig them up. Or, more accurately, find someone else who had dug them up.
While that fits my narrative that blogging is journalism, it’s a narrative I resist — mainly because I don’t like the label.
Even if bloggers and journalists are doing the same thing, both have a problem with The Other.
In general, while bloggers don’t want to be The Other, journalists don’t want to seem to be The Other. This is why bloggers stubbornly, constantly admit their biases, while journalists stubbornly and constantly do not.
While my dark side often suspects that bloggers are honest journalists, while journalists are dishonest bloggers, you can’t say things like that without being misunderstood, so I should probably keep such thoughts safely locked away in the narrative closet where they belong. Besides, I tend to misunderstand myself, and it occurs to me that there’s no way to call a blogger an “honest journalist” if he won’t admit to being a journalist at all.
(Unless there’s such a thing as honest dishonesty.
But there can’t be. For that would mean that bloggers are closeted journalists. (And journalists are closeted bloggers.)