Investigative journalism is getting a new name: blogs

I visited my parents last weekend and spent some time watching a segment on a local tv station online titled “Does it work?” The show’s purpose was to take products shown in infomercials and to test them to see if the claims made about the product was actually true. Some of the products worked, some did not. One of my first questions about the show was if the makers of the products or the public relations firms that represented the products had had a hand in determining which products worked and which didn’t. In other words, did the companies represented on the news show use their advertising dollars as a way to manipulate the outcome of the product, whether positively or negatively?  

 

Advertising money greatly affects how our “free” press operates. Most journalists will tell you they are not influenced by advertising money, but most decisions in the news rooms are not determined by the journalists. What story goes where and what ad goes on what page is determined by the page designers, copy editors, editors and ultimately, the publisher. You will never see a story about an airplane crash story placed next to an airline ad. This would be detrimental to the advertiser, who paid good money to be in the paper.

 

This is why I think that, and this really makes no sense, journalism should not be funded by advertising, the free markets, corporations, etc., and should be firmly rooted under the federal and state governments. I still don’t understand how the most liberal television station or radio station are PBS and NPR, respectively. This is odd, considering we have a conservative Republican government, yet if I want liberal news, I turn to the government to give it to me. And I don’t really even think that “liberal” is the right word, but possibly fair, or crazily, objective (something you won’t get from the networks).

 

This is why we possibly should be looking to bloggers as our future “spin-killers” for the media. Instead of whistle-blowers and corruption-stoppers turning to major media to get their story out, they will probably turn to bloggers. What’s the point of whistle-blowing to NBC if you work for GE, which owns that network? Corporate synergy and media consolidation is killing the objective journalist, and that’s why we need bloggers to take to the cyber-underground and start getting the truth out there, one Web site at a time.

 

The best defense for a blogger is to do journalism and say you aren’t a journalist. Since mass media law and libel hasn’t fully been integrated into the online world, bloggers get to have the whole piece of cake, and slowly eat each and every bite.

 

Questions:

1. Why do corporations, especially public relations firms, want to beat traditional journalists to the World Wide Web?
2. Why is a “hierarchy of trust” online so important? Why do we need to assign levels of credibility to one commenter over another – corporate spin is covered under the 1^st Amendment, so why should bloggers/journalists be so upset about it?