Ex-CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg compares blogs to CB radio and to ticks on a dog

I was fully prepared to lather myself up into a full-blown rant over ex-CBS News correspondent Eric Engberg's provocative op-ed entitled "Blogging As Typing, Not Journalism."  But after re-reading his piece a couple of times, I'm only half lathered, and half bemused. Mr. Engberg is a self-described "retired mainstream media ('MSM') journalist — and thus a double-dinosaur." His op-ed certainly shows that even old-media dinosaurs can snark it up with the best bloggers, however, and it's a lively read. His lede:

As the election campaign unfolded, operators of some of the internet’s politics-oriented blogs, no doubt high on the perfume of many "hits" and their own developing sense of community, envisioned a future when they would diminish then replace the traditional media as the nation’s primary source of political news and commentary....

Big plans and big claims are to be expected from folks — pajama-clad or not — who are dabbling with new technology and new modalities of public expression.... But I worked on a school paper when I was a kid and I owned a CB radio when I lived in Texas. And what I saw in the blogosphere on Nov. 2 was more reminiscent of that school paper or a "Breaker, breaker 19" gabfest on CB than anything approaching journalism.

Let's give Mr. Engberg a pass on his CB faux pas — any self-respecting Texas CB user would know that's supposed to be "Breaker one-nine," but perhaps he's the victim of an editor who over-zealously applied some stylebook rules and accidentally garbled the CB jargon.  Ditto for Mr. Engberg's op-ed's headline — "keyboarding" being the current word I think he was looking for, as my sixteen-year-old son recently corrected me when I asked him whether he was benefiting much from his "typing class."

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I must, however, give Mr. Engberg credit for picking an easy target of blogospheric hubris (Andrew Sullivan) for quotes to set up his straw man, and then for choosing an excellent factual example (election coverage and, in particular, the promulgation of badly misleading exit poll leaks) to knock the strawman back down.  I don't know of any serious person, however, much less a serious and respected blogger — including Andrew Sullivan (whom I think Mr. Engberg has quoted out of context) — who expects bloggers to wholly "replace the traditional media as the nation’s primary source of political news."  Diminish, yes; augment and supplement, absolutely.  But not replace.  That's just rhetorical overkill.

As a trial lawyer, my particular profession gives me a considerably more potent set of tools to develop factual information than Mr. Engberg or his mainstream media colleagues can even dream of — chief among them the ability to subpoena witnesses, compel their production of documentary and other types of evidence, and cross-examine them in front of a videographer and court reporter, on penalty of going to jail for contempt of court if they refuse to cooperate, or to prison for perjury if they deliberately lie. But although my professional experience and training certainly aid and influence my blogging substance and style, nevertheless, when I'm blogging, I'm pursuing an avocation, a hobby. As a blogger, I'm keenly aware not only that I have to leave the pointy parts of my professional toolbox behind, but also that I lack the access that politicians and other newsmakers routinely — eagerly — grant to professional journalists. BeldarBlog can (and did) rant and rave and thunder about Sen. Kerry's stonewalling on his military records; Sen. Kerry can (and did) ignore me. And since I must doff my pajamas and pursue my day job from time to time, and lack the financial and logistical resources to hang around "the action" (wherever that may be for a given story), I'm pretty much dependent on other sources — sometimes other bloggers, sometimes a non-media knowledgeable professional, but yes, mostly members of the mainstream media — to gather the facts and quotes that can't be found online.

But there are abundant recent examples of bloggers offering news analysis who themselves have "PhD-style expertise" that professional journalists lack. The lawyer-bloggers —  including yours truly —  who helped expose CBS News' Rathergate fraud, for example, deal with document authentication (and other experts in that particular field), chain of custody, and bias on a day-to-day basis. Other bloggers brought their own substantial technical expertise on computer fonts and printing to bear as well. I respectfully submit that in writing an op-ed about the just-past election season without ever mentioning that tawdry episode, Mr. Engberg has shown that he has brontosaurus-sized testicles — and mole-like vision. 

Likewise, when it comes to doing "background" factual research, savvy bloggers using Google (and for some of us, Lexis/Nexis and other online databases) have found quotes and other pertinent facts that mainstream media reporters flat out missed and sometimes — for example, in the cases of Sen. Kerry's "Christmas in Cambodia" seared memories, or his Belodeau Eulogy (both from the Congressional Record) — shamefully continued to largely ignore.

Commentary, of course, is another matter altogether, and Mr. Engberg badly errs in lumping both it and news analysis in with news reporting. It's not a coincidence that Glenn Reynolds' blog is called "InstaPundit" instead of "InstaReporter." And the election season just past has proved in spades that new media (blogs, talk radio, cable TV) have already dramatically "diminish[ed] ... the traditional media as the nation’s primary source of political ... commentary." Walter Cronkite could almost single-handedly prompt a reshaping of American public opinion about the Vietnam War when he changed, and expressed, his own opinion after the Tet Offensive. But no mainstream media source — nor all of them put together — will ever have that much practical power again. If Mr. Engberg doesn't recognize that, he's not just a "double-dinosaur," or even a fossil — he's the Piltdown Man.

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I agree with quite a bit of what Mr. Engberg wrote about the blogosphere's propagation of misleading exit poll data. He writes, for example, that

[w]hile out on the campaign trail covering candidates, my own network’s political unit would not even give me exit poll information on election days because it was thought to be too tricky for a common reporter to comprehend. If you are standing in the main election night studio when your network’s polling experts start discussing the significance of a particular state poll, you the reporter will hear about three words out of one hundred that you will understand. These polls occur in the realm of statistics and probability. They require PhD-style expertise to understand. The people who analyze them for news organizations, like the legendary Warren Mitofsky and Martin Plissner at CBS News — have trade associations like doctors do to certify their work.

But as he himself points out (while seeming to miss the point), the folks at Slate.com who contributed to the spread of misleading exit poll information on Nov. 2 actually are professional journalists. And it's a safe bet that the ultimate sources of the raw exit poll data leaked to the amateur bloggers Mr. Engberg criticized are almost certainly also professional journalists. Mr. Engberg retired two years ago; it's a pity, then, that he's already forgotten the absolute dog's breakfast his own network and the rest of the mainstream media made of their over-reliance on exit poll data in the 2000 election, when their premature and inaccurate projections and flip-flops almost certainly influenced hundreds of thousands of votes. Apparently Mr. Engberg has retired now to a subterranean bunker in lovely Palmetto, Florida, and he's forgotten all about the shattered glass house (a/k/a Black Rock) from which he previously plied his profession.

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Thus, I can't take too much serious offense at Mr. Engberg's snarky hyperbole when he concludes:

The public is now assaulted by news and pretend-news from many directions, thanks to the now infamous "information superhighway." But the ability to transmit words, we learned during the Citizens Band radio fad of the 70’s, does not mean that any knowledge is being passed along. One of the verdicts rendered by election night 2004 is that, given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility, the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on.

My CB radio actually did pass along quite a bit of useful knowledge back in the 1970s — mostly about speed trap locations — and I never imagined that I was Edward R. Murrow when I used it. Nor do I mistake myself for Dan Rather now that I'm blogging. I'd actually much rather be compared to a flea or a tick, and my own loyal and well-tempered dog deserves better than being compared to Dan Rather.