February 14, 2005, 10.21am • 14 comments » • 961 Views

Bloggers as “news media trophy hunters”

And you thought pack journalism was bad.

The resignation Friday, after a fornight of intense blogosphere pressure, of CNN’s chief news executive Eason Jordon, after he apparently said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he believed the US military had aimed to kill journalists, has been hailed as another scalp for blah-blah bloggers.

Now bloggers can claim to have been instrumental in the resignation of Republican senator Trent Lott, CBS News anchor Dan Rather and Eason amongst those heads they have lopped off for mantelpiece prize trophies.

“The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail”, Technology > Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/technology/14cnn.html?pagewanted=1″>The New York Times quotes Columbia Journalism Review Daily editor Steve Lovelady as saying.

“Have we entered an era where our lives can be destroyed by a pack of wolves hacking at their keyboards with no oversight, no editors, and no accountability?” asked a blogger named Mark Coffey, 36, [who thinks the mainstream mass media (MSM)] is being held to account as never before by the strong force of individual citizens who won’t settle for sloppy research and inflammatory comments without foundation, particularly from those with a wide national reach, such as Rather and Eason.

This was the post, from businessman Rony Abovitz to the forum’s official blog, that stirred up the latest controvery, the Times said.

So is this the best journoblogging can do? Journoblogging sets itself apart from the alleged excesses and misdirection of mainstream journalism. But, by holding public figures to account, aggressively pursuing the latest cock-up and looking to claim high-profile scalps, are bloggers merely replicating, well… British journalism?