Smoking Gun barrels into mainstream media
The publishing equivalent of the McDonald's hot-coffee suit?
Maybe James Frey's sequel will be called "A Million Little Lawsuits.'' Two complaints filed in Manhattan courts Monday took aim at the debunked memoir "A Million Little Pieces,'' which was hailed -- and later slammed -- by Oprah Winfrey. In a federal class-action suit, readers said the book was a waste of time and they should be reimbursed for the cost of the tome and the hours they spent reading it. here
The upbraiding Oprah Winfrey gave "memoirist" James Frey last week gives us a chance to look both forward and back in journalism.
As for the future, Larry Pryor, a prof at USC, says blogs like The Smoking Gun aren't that different from corporate media, although they're "maybe not as consistent" (here). He calls The Smoking Gun "straight reporting."
True, TSG did pick up on Frey's liberties with the facts because it went looking for his mugshot and couldn't find it. (He hadn't told the straight story about his criminal record, so there was no mug, something that seems to have eluded everybody else including his publisher.) That's certainly reporting.
Maybe Frey should be called a "fictoirist." There's a long, long tradition in American culture -- even journalism -- holding that the story is more important than the facts. A Nobel laureate is among those tarred by the fictoirism brush ((here). The most successful political example of truth-over-facts might be Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen" story, and the shakiness of the factual underpinnings for it. Not a memoir, but certainly a type of bio. I don't have to -- but I guess I will -- dredge up anything as remote as Mason Locke Weems' invention of the George Washington cherry-tree incident (here), and anyway George himself didn't make that one up. But it's one of the few things about Washington that everybody "knows."
We love a good story. That's why we call news items "stories," using the same word we do for myths, sagas, fables, folk-tales, and fairy-tales (here). Fact is fungible. We have to live with it.
That leaves the question of how we live with it in a blog-cum-tradjournalism world. Prof. Pryor says blogs and corporate media won't really compete. It'll be more a case of complementing each other; they'll perform different functions. Likely, to a degree. How information providers -- be they blog or newspaper -- function includes the little matter of how the audience uses them. And how the audience uses the media's offerings affects the basic, raw information that the political-media machine grazes on. Relatively few publications will do the equivalent of what TSG does: dig around for mugshots of badly behaved celebs. It's a niche, and there's a lot more niches out there for blogs to fill.
As the blog niches spin, proliferate and fill up, they'll attract readers -- people increasingly tend to use news sources in search mode, not receive-what-the-channel-sends-me mode. The corporate readership and viewership, in turn, erode. People can only spend so much time and attention in one place. And as that mass audience declines, corporate media can devote a diminishing store of resources to actual fact-checking -- not that they're overly inclined in that direction anyway.
Marc Fisher in AJR captures, I think, the precarious and tippy balance that this apparently complementary relationship will strike in the political world:
As if the relationships among government, the campaign industry and the news media were not troubled enough, now comes a new player that purports to be a fresh, grassroots voice but is rapidly evolving into an agent for spin, stealth identities and yes, scattered around the wild world of blogging, some aggressive and original reporting. The new political blogs sometimes look and act like purveyors of journalism, but at least as often, they play the roles of propagandist, gossip, campaign clubhouse and vehicle for personal attacks.
See the rest here, a must-read for Web-political wonks.
The blogs have the capacity to do great commercial harm to the denizens of traditional media organizations. But even the bloggers generally admit that they feed off the material that corporate media feed them -- possibly couldn't exist without it. Ultimately, we'll see more Smoking Guns, fewer traditional journalistic cannons. It's squeeze play on corporate media's audience, and it means the old guns will be able to squeeze off fewer rounds. The blogs may indeed shoot the very messenger that brings them their lifeblood content. And if that happens, it'll leave us in a whole new world.