ANDREW SULLIVAN’S WRAPUP on the Howell Raines scandals is worth reading in full. But here’s an excerpt:
It’s worth reviewing that the blogosphere was there before the mainstream media caught on and long before the Jayson Blair revelation. First, blogs revealed how many of the NYT’s polls were skewed in the way they presented or spun data. They exposed the anti-Bush fervor of the Enron coverage. Then they broadcast the revelation of how Paul Krugman had once had lucrative former ties with Enron. We exposed blatant lies on the front-page – from allegedly soaring temperatures in Alaska to the fabricated cooptation of Henry Kissinger into the anti-war camp in August 2002. The process was relentless. In the end, even fabulist Maureen Dowd couldn’t get away with doctoring quotes from the president to make a partisan point because a relatively little known blogger caught her, and passed it on. And in all this, we were helped by hundreds of readers who found errors and bias where others didn’t – meta-bloggers, if you will.
It’s that horizontal knowledge at work! (And Collin Levey, writing in the WSJ, agrees.) The irony is that professional journalists — even though some have gotten their backs up over all this criticism of the revered Times — should appreciate this. The way for Big Media to respond to the blogosphere’s criticisms and competition is to do a better job, which means largely reversing the past couple of decades’ trends toward downsizing, bureau-closing, homogenization, and substitution of “analysis” for reporting.
UPDATE: Lileks, being a genius, goes to Fark to collect his NYT reax quotes. And there’s this:
10:03 Andrew Sullivan just floated six inches off the ground and gently revolved in mid air, and when he touched down he said to himself: Howell Raines has just resigned. I can feel it.
Heh. And here’s a good wrapup news story by Matthew Rose and Laurie Cohen from the WSJ. Excerpt:
“There is an endemic cultural issue at the Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top-down hierarchical structure,” Linda Greenhouse, a veteran Times reporter who covers the Supreme Court, said in an interview last month. “And it’s a culture where speaking truth to power has never been particularly welcomed.”
Indeed.