Does the proliferation of bloggers make ethical demands for news journalists redundant?

Some of this information came from an essay I did for Joe Atkinson's Political Content of Television paper. The discussion is based around the idea that with the increase of news sources, in particular blogging, has there become less of a need for journalists to be ethical and impartial?

Throughout much of history people would get their news from few sources, a nightly news show, the radio or daily newspaper. With the arrival of Web 2.0, people are increasingly 'logging on' and utilising the massive potential of the internet. A big part of this has been the explosion of online new media. What were originally only email and messenger services have blossomed to include social networking sites, wikis, weblogs, podcasts, online newspaper content and search engines. Old news sources such as daily newspapers and broadcast news face declining readerships/ viewers worldwide yet some blog sites are getting up to 100 hits a second[1]
What was once a small group of devotees has grown into a massive industry where anyone in the world, provided they have web access, can have their voice heard by millions.

Blogging has seen a massive increase even in the last few years as more people are going online. Some of them anonymous, some journalists, some societal commentators and even just interested parties all espousing their views over the internet. A study in 2005 showed that some 50 million US internet users visited blogs in the first quarter of 2005.

New media definately has some advantages, information can be uploaded with immediacy giving news a more up-to-date quality. People can instantly search through google to find information and there sometimes hundreds of websites devoted to a topic. Behind the safety and anonymity of a computer screen keyboard warriors the world over are changing the way we view the media.

Traditional mainstream news has long held as a major tenet the fairness and accuracy of its reporting. Joe Atkinson said "journalists are said to identify more readily with their profession than with the organisation to which they belong". Journalistic integrity and freedom of the press is one of the basic building blocks of any liberal democracy. Most people in society do not have the time or inclination to research everything around them so it is the requirement of journalists and the media to do this for them. This has given the profession some fundamental guidelines in how to operate in the interests of a free and informed society. Journalists are required to act as public watchdogs and there Joe Atkinson outlined a set of ideological values self-imposed upon the profession.

• the public service aspect; acting as watchdogs in the public interest
• providing objectivity to their reporting; giving impartial, balanced views
• maintaining autonomy; that journalists act as independence and are not beholden to any groups
• immediacy; that the news they report is current and up to date.
• ethics; that journalists retain their personal integrity

If journalists are caught making up lies or supplying incorrect information they are censured and can lose their jobs, this is not the case with blogging. A weblog, as discussed, can be a completely anonymous medium; the intentions of a blogger are not automatically clear. A blog will generally be written with a particular intention, as this one is, otherwise there would be little point in doing it. Objectivity and impartiality are big issues within the blogosphere. If your reason for discussing an issue is from being directly affected by it notions of fairness and impartiality are nulled. What blogs can do well is give opinion, but they cannot prove to give impartial reporting. There is a marked decline in traditional media. The likelihood of the blogging world adopting journalistic values is slight. So what will happen to the values?

Paul McLeary of the Columbia Journalism Review has advocated a two-tier system:

"where the big news organisations deliver the goods in the form of hard news and investigative pieces whose production requires the kind of investment in time and money that most Web sites and blogs can't match, while the blogosphere takes the lead in opinion writing and analysis"[2]

On this I think McLeary has it right, a two tier system would enable journalists to focus solely on what is important; reporting the news. so opinion and editorial pieces would not be required. This would mean that issues of bias and impartiality would not be as hotly debated as the bloggers would be the ones controlling the opinion side of the news.

Mainstream news still has a requirement to report news factually and correctly, invoking the five ideological values of Atkinson. There is still far too much unaccountability in the blogging world and too many agendas to ever say they can satisfy all the criteria of a completely free press. They can certainly be a major part of the media moving forward, especially with the attraction the youth have to the internet. What is required though, is that mainstream traditional television news retains the ideals it has long held.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/jul/20/news.newmedia.
[2] www.cjr.org/