In Defense of Consequences

Last week bloggers across America were shocked when a judge in Oregon ruled that a blogger must pay $2.5 million for comments she made about an investment firm because she’s not a journalist. According to the ruling, she wasn’t a journalist because she wasn’t affiliated with any organized news service. Bloggers were outraged.

I get where they are coming from, but I felt vindicated.

I understand their frustration because journalism has changed so much since I was in college. “Organized” media has been consolidated and, in many cases, the rules we learned in school were thrown out the window in favor of packaging whatever information would provide the best ratings. In a lot of cases, the people who are really going out in the world to uncover truth are independent bloggers. The problem is, most of them don’t have the education or experience to attribute sources or verify facts.

Subsequently, you have a very mixed bag of skill and integrity. What’s missing here – what the judge was trying to get across – is credentials. I have no doubt that media is forever changed by the immediacy of electronic communication and I have no doubt that some individual bloggers are great reporters. Some are even highly-credentialed journalists. But without standards, some bloggers are able to pose as journalists even if they are just lunatics with axes to grind. We saw this happen numerous times throughout the BP oil spill crisis. Anyone with a conspiracy theory could be taken seriously whether they had real evidence or not. Once the story was out there, it was shared and re-posted until it was so ubiquitous it must be true.

It will be interesting to see how standards emerge with this new media. I’m sure this will be only the first of many lawsuits that over time will produce concrete standards by which a blogger can also be called a journalist. Serious bloggers would be wise to band together to create those standards on their own.  Serious journalism schools would be wise to fold blogging in to their standards as well.  In the meantime, I’m glad to see that there are now possible consequences for making cavalier statements. Bloggers who are concerned this might happen to them would do well to choose their words more carefully – and get insurance.