Dr. Dobb's Journal November, 2005
The media as body armor: There's a figure of speech to conjure with. It does actually make a kind of weird sense, but let me set it up for you. This past summer, a minor battle raged briefly on the Web after online journalist Andrew Orlowski of The Register annoyed professional blogger Robert Scoble. I'm trying to be careful about the labels here, because the distinction between mainstream media, or MSM, and the blogger world is sometimes tenuous. But Orlowski's credentials are definitely those of a journalist, albeit a cheeky, puckish British journalist, and Scoble actually calls himself a Microsoft Geek Blogger.
The subject of their debate is not my subject here, but it had something to do with Orlowski announcing the latest minor Microsoft sin in language perhaps more apocalyptic than was absolutely necessary and Scoble, paid to blog by Microsoft, defending his employer with perhaps a bit more loyalty than logic. But then the rabble were roused and the flamewar began and the original dispute was lost in the slurs against Scoble and Orlowski and their respective employers.
What I found interesting, and this is my real point, is that those who attacked Orlowski and The Reg impugned them as bad journalists. I don't agree with that characterization, but it cheers me because it suggests that people do think there is such a thing as good journalism. I was beginning to wonder.
When the troops in Iraq found that the body armor they had been issued wasn't adequate against the kinds of slings and arrows that fortune was chucking at them, some of them started making their own. DIY for the GI Online—something similar was happening with the news media.
Are blogs replacing conventional journalism as our primary source of news? And if so, is that a bad thing?
From reading blogs and rumor sites, I now know that:
It may be that all these things are true, but I'm having a little trouble making them fit into one coherent picture.
Mainstream journalism, on the other hand, isn't much more coherent. In the August 15 issue of InfoWorld, Tom Yager wrote the following:
During a discussion with a source close to the AMD v. Intel antitrust lawsuit, I heard something that really grabbed my attention. AMD, he said, isn't suing Intel because Intel is a monopoly; it's suing Intel for abusing its monopoly powers to maintain its control of the market. I had never heard it put so succinctly.
I can only assume that Tom was catatonic or on vacation through the long months of the Microsoft antitrust case, when variations on the phrase "abusing its monopoly powers to maintain its control of the market" were constantly in the tech press.
Another minion of the MSM, Stephen Lawson of IDG News Service, checked in with an expert on the Zotob MS-05-039 worm and got (and saw fit to publish) the following astute analysis:
"The next twelve hours will tell us, is this going to be big, or is it just going to go away in the next couple of hours?" said Joe Hartmann, director of antivirus research at Trend Micro, in Cupertino, California.
That's so true, isn't it? In fact, I propose that we promote it to the status of a law—Hartmann's Law:
The next twelve hours will tell us what's going to happen in the next couple of hours.
This comes from the MSM, so take it with a grain of salt: Bullet-proof vests made of Zylon apparently have a defect: They do not, in fact, stop bullets. They are, however, considerably more comfortable than Kevlar vests during the 99-plus percent of the time when you are not actually being shot.
Blogs are the Zylon of news media. Unfortunately for the metaphor and for the MSM, the mainstream media are not the Kevlar of the news media. The mainstream media are the chain mail of the news media.
And the bullets are flying thick and fast.
DDJ