I was listening to MLB Homeplate on XM 175 and caught the tail end of host Charley Steiner's interview with a sportscaster. In the interview, Steiner commented on bloggers, and made a point of saying that they don't need any credentials, all they need is a keyboard and a computer.
He was, of course, intimating that bloggers shouldn't be taken seriously when they write about sports. The fact that they don't have any credentials makes them suspect as a source of information.
Fast forward about fifty-five seconds. Steiner moves on to the topic of Curt Schilling's bloody sock. (For those not in the know, broadcaster Gary Thorne reported that Doug Mirabelli said something about the blood on Curt Schilling's sock in the 2004 ALCS being fake. Thorne has since retracted the report, saying he misinterpreted Mirabelli's words). To get Schilling's view, Steiner read out a few words from the Red Sox pitcher. Guess where the words came from?
Curt Schilling's blog.
So which is it, Charley? Are bloggers to be taken seriously, or not? And if you are going to pick and choose your blogs, you'll have to tell your audience what credentials a blogger needs before you'll use his stuff on the air. A journalism degree? A life in politics? A 90-mph fastball?
As Steiner says, all you need to be a blogger is a computer and keyboard. That's true. But tell me, what else do you need to be a journalist? I've published material in various places before, I've cashed the checks, I've written back and forth with editors. There's a degree on my wall, but it isn't in journalism. No editor has ever asked what my degree is in, or if I even have one. In fact, the topic of schooling has never come up.
Why? Because editors couldn't give a damn what degree you hold. Like a GM in baseball, they want one thing and one thing only out of their players: good stuff. They want well-written, topical pieces, that are supported by facts. If you can write an explosive story about the president, supported six ways from Sunday, an editor is not going to toss your stuff in the trash just because you didn't attend Yale.
Let's get one thing straight: if Steiner is talking about bloggers that are writing "Red Sox suck!" on their front pages, then I am on his side entirely. But if he's talking about all bloggers everywhere, then I think he's full of it. And he's also afraid. He's afraid that enough people with a computer and keyboard might find out how to do his job, and they might even take his job away from him.
The internet has blown things wide open on all fronts. Buying a house used to be the domain of the real estate agent. An agent could tell you whatever they wanted, and you more or less had to believe them. "The market's tanking," they could say, and you'd sell early, afraid of taking a loss. That isn't the case now. Today you can go on-line and do a couple of weeks of research before even contacting the real estate agent. If the agent hands you a line of bull, you'll know it, and you'll move on to somebody else. That is, if you think you still need somebody else. Maybe you'll just do it yourself.
Term life insurance, the cost of video games, the stats on a big league pitcher, all of this is the same thing: information. The experts used to hoard this information for themselves, and we would pay them to give it to us. Now we don't have to. I can compare life insurance policies from different companies in the blink of an eye. I can find out that the video game at one store is ten bucks cheaper than the other guy's. I can go online and see for myself how well a pitcher does against right-handed hitting. In the process of looking up that stat, I save myself a dollar on a newspaper.
It is no wonder that Steiner and his brethren are afraid of bloggers. Guys like him used to be able to tell people whatever they wanted. They chose what information we were allowed to hear. It was they alone who decided what was newsworthy, and what was not.
The rules have changed. Ten years ago if he had said something on the air, no one could check it out. Now we can. We can research his research, and we can debate him on any issue that he brings up, short of going into his personal life. Virtually all of the information he has, we have. Even if he has an interview with someone, there is nothing stopping a person from going online, finding that guest's agent, and trying to set up an interview of their own.
What I find disturbing about Steiner's attitude is its conceit. The idea that all of the people out there with keyboards and computers are sheep. If you don't have a newspaper's name on your letterhead, you can't write intelligently about baseball? Ludicrous. Charley Steiner watches a baseball game, reads the newswire, checks the stats, then goes on the air to pontificate about it. Fine. But who can't do that? Nobody. Because we all have Charley's tools.
Regarding the mainstream media types, Schilling had this to say:
"Does anyone stop reading their newspapers? Watching the shows they appear on? The answer to that is no. Instead of using the forums they participate in to do something truly different, change lives, inspire people, you have an entire subset of media whose sole purpose in life is to actually be the news, instead of report it."
Well put, blogger.
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