Noonan on Bloggers

Peggy Noonan has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal about blogging entitled "The Blogs Must Be Crazy." But then Ms. Noonan is always great. However, I think she misses a larger set of points about the “qualifications” of bloggers to provide both accurate reporting and insightful commentary and context for stories.

First, bloggers are not just people who didn’t go to J-school, i.e., high school or college graduates, although there are many who fit that description. They are also often people with different, and sometimes significantly more rigorous post-graduate training. The notion that someone with a journalism degree is somehow more qualified to report on or opine about a story having to do with, for instance, the actuarial trends of the Social Security system’s solvency, than, for instance, an actuary-blogger, or an ERISA attorney-blogger, or a CPA-blogger, or an economist-blogger, strikes me as a very silly proposition indeed. A journalism degree in this light is somewhat like a primary education degree… sure you can write (or teach) at an eighth-grade level about basic facts, but for an understanding of what those facts mean and how to make decisions about those facts in the real world, grown-ups turn to experts and specialists, not to journalists (or grade-school teachers).

Second, many bloggers are lawyers, like Instapundit and Powerline (and yours truly). One thing this gives such bloggers is a significant advantage in understanding what does and doesn’t (or shouldn’t) count as evidence. Lawyers (and particularly litigators) operate under codified rules of evidence. Do “journalists” have such a code? No. (I've previously written at length about this topic here in a post entitled "What is a Journalist?".)

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, bloggers are most often people with JOBS apart from their “reporting” or punditry. Does this make them less professional? Probably a little. (One of the reasons I haven't posted much this month, for instance, is that I've been freakishly busy traveling, taking depositions, etc.) But it also provides an advantage… bloggers aren’t people who spend their day talking to other journalists or pundits in New York or Washington or Los Angeles or San Francisco or Chicago. Because they have jobs, and because they aren’t necessarily(because of the wonders of the Internet) located in the big cities, they almost always have very different experiences than the MSM, and have bumped up against very different people. I’m not saying necessarily that bloggers have broader or deeper experience of the “real world” than most journalists, although I think I could make that case. I’m just saying that their experience is different, and fills in gaps in the collective experience of the MSM. As Noonan says, that’s a public service.