A year ago, a friend whose father worked at Businessweek recounted a tragically funny tale of technology and the silly responses it engenders. The owner of the magazine’s publishing group, an incompetent playboy, reportedly swept into the editorial department, held up a CD-ROM, and, before the assembled employees, declared the now-obscure device to be the future of journalism.
To read Herald Editor-in-Chief Kevin Bargnes’ commentary on Bryon Eagon’s endorsement of Scott Resnick and his subsequent jibe at the local blogosphere was to feel the same juxtaposition of the somewhat new and the painfully misguided. What started out as a poorly thought-out critique of an early endorsement ended with a refusal to “cover mudslinging rants written by the student government wonks that now infest the fledgling campus blogosphere.”
Eagon’s endorsement, as a few friends in the aforementioned blogosphere noted, was made for fairly intuitive reasons: Whatever his rather obvious larger ambitions may be, Eagon has been an honest public servant. Endorsing Resnick early in the campaign allows him to begin campaigning for his political horse immediately and without any ethical inconsistency. Assuming Resnick’s passage through the primary is a given, the more time the current alder can put in on his behalf, the better.
This observation is hardly original. It does not require a lot of brainpower. Yet the only people I heard echoing it were campus bloggers – hardened political junkies with no higher purpose than a simple love of the game. To argue, as Bargnes did, that the blogosphere’s tendency towards vitriol negates the value of its insight displays a profound sense of hubris that conventional journalists quite simply cannot afford to hold anymore. Newspapers may hold themselves to standards of objectivity that merit admiration, but morality doesn’t mean anything in a market where the only difference between your information and mine are high production costs.
Asking the wonks wouldn’t only have prevented a hastily thought-out column from being written, but it would improve the quality and bulk of news a student paper, with its limited resources, can provide.
Take, for example, recent claims that District 8 candidate Kyle Szarzynski misused student money while running the Student Tenant Union. The Teaching Assistants’ Association, for one, doesn’t buy it.
Whatever the truth behind these and other allegations spewed by bloggers, the campus press has an immense amount to gain from kids with vendettas and fascinations with open records requests. And speaking of open records requests, your average student might care more about their campus representation if they knew that student government leaders asked for information on the Badger Partnership in order to win an argument with the proposal’s opponents while keeping that information secret from everyone else. And for all those aspiring reporters fresh into the School of Journalism, an excellent critique of press coverage on the dispute between local unions and the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery might provide a helpful list of don’ts for next time.
You can choose to believe all of the allegations brought forth by blogs on this campus, or you can ignore them entirely – just as you can choose to switch the channel on your TV. What matters isn’t that blogs are unimpeachably honest, but that refusing to embrace them can lead to some pretty lousy judgment calls. Like criticizing a smart endorsement. Like failing to do some background research. Like holding up a thin binding of paper and words and pictures, proclaiming the future to an empty room.
Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in economics.
