November 4, 2004, 11.34pm • 11 comments » • 1,433 Views

Big Media bash blogs’ bogus ballots

A backlash of sorts is brewing. After bloggers splashed with early exit data from Tuesday’s US election - set against the mainstream news networks’ pledge to be responsible this time around - CBS MarketWatch’s Frank Barnako lays in to this most introspective of media, saying:-

Despite all the anti-Bush screeds on Web logs (sic), the frequent priming of wordy bonfires with Bush’s National Guard duty records, the rush to judgment about missing explosives in Iraq … it just didn’t matter. All those opinions. All that Internet buzz. So little impact … Bottom line: Political blogging is like Ralph Nader. Nobody pays attention.

Most of which is fair enough, and Barnako is balanced, but how much does that last point about attention hold true when you recall it was an army of fact-checking bloggers that forced his own CBS News into a retraction of its National Guard story?

In a separate piece, Barnako bemoans the “cut, paste and comment” culture of journoblogging and suggests both the mainstream media and exit poll organisation NEP had a big health warning over the figures and, employing professional news judgements, didn’t run what the amateur bloggers did.

The AP quotes representatives of CNN, CBS and Fox News as offering big scepticism over those early exit polls, which at first indicated a big swing toward Kerry and which were splashed early on by blogs.

The Seattle Times draws a direct line between the blogs’ publishing of the data and the early optimism about a Kerry victory - hopes that were dashed, unfounded, by the morning after:-

[Question marks over their voracity] didn’t stop the bloggers, and by the middle of the day Tuesday, the perception that Kerry was winning had been absorbed into the political mainstream.

And, of course, there was the earlier report blaming the blogs for a fall in the Dow Jones that same afternoon.

So, journobloggers… scooping at the boundaries of journalism? … scapegoated for inaccuracies in the exit polls? … irresponsible characateurs of journalists?