Could Bloggers Have Spared Newsweek the Embarrassment?

I get both Time* and Newsweek at my house, but not simultaneously. My habit has been to subscribe to Time for a year or two, then switch over to Newsweek. Just to keep a sense of impartiality around here and to monitor the competition between our two top national newsweeklies -- and sometimes to save a couple of bucks when one publisher or the other offers an irresistible deal. (That happens a lot. I mean, given the power of Web-based media, you explain to me the compelling reasons for buying Time or Newsweek in the year 2005. Not easy, eh?)

I've also sometimes taken U.S. News & World Report. But I just can't do that anymore. I have given them half a dozen chances, but they always disappoint. Sorry, guys. The magazine is just too slow on the uptake. Too weird in its cover-story picks. And too boring too often.

Anyway, I mention all this against the backdrop of news over the weekend that Newsweek has apologized for some appalling wrong reporting, reporting which, unfortunately, led indirectly to more than a dozen deaths in the Islamic world.

In all the well-publicized episodes of major U.S. news organizations blundering because of hubris or (worse) laziness -- and I think often it's been a combination of both -- this is one of the most horrific. Eventually, we can forgive Newsweek, but we cannot forget. In most of the other notable journalistic scandals of recent vintage, some of them mentioned in Roger L. Simon's HuffPost blog post this morning, no one died (unless you consider the sacking of New York Times exec editor Howell Raines like a passing in the family, but I doubt that).

Almost all news organizations occasionally need to chew on a little crow, which is embarrsssing for them, although, in a more global way, it isn't such a bad thing. Those that behave properly in the aftermath of a screw-up promptly fall on their swords, explain what went wrong, vow it'll never happen again, and then hire a PR firm to restore credibility with their audience and advertisers (a futile effort in many cases). All well and good.

However, here's where I part company with fellow HuffPost blogger Simon. He is way more trusting of the blogosphere than I am.

Like many others who are taken with this new-fangled form (and, clearly, I am one of them), he views the vast blogosphere as essentially self-correcting. Erroneous info, put out there by bloggers with evil intentions, political ill will, or lack of, uh, facts, will be balanced by react from others in the great Out There Somewhere who know better. Well, over time -- days, weeks, months -- that may be true. But in the insanely speedy news cycle of today, the self-correcting mechanism doesn't work nearly fast enough.

I'm all for a world in which bloggers by the kazillions tap away at their keyboards 24 hours a day. At the same time, let's understand that a guy in his underpants sitting at a glowing laptop computer isn't necessarily equal to an experienced, trained journalist working for the mainstream media. The blogger may indeed have better information at his disposal. If so, we'll figure that out. Eventually.

Still, I will almost always place my bet on a seasoned reporter, a pro, someone who fully grasps the notion of fairness and balance -- and fact-getting -- and who diligently represses as best he can his own political or religious convictions.

Good journalists do that every day. Good bloggers don't need to. Indeed, you may argue that they shouldn't. Different strokes for different folks, as they say.

In a positive sign of the times, we are beginning to see a growing cadre of hybrid journos. They're trained in school or in the field (i.e., the real world), they work for profit-making news organizations, but they blog to their heart's content. They are both bloggers and reputable journalists both. Two, two, two reporters in one!

For me, personally, I remain skeptical of much that I read in blogs, except when I know and respect the author. Let's not lose perspective on this: Access to inexpensive blogging software does not make you an investigative reporter. It just makes you a guy with an Internet account and a megaphone.

Some of my fellow bloggers around the world may take issue with my views here. Cool. They'll share their own contrary opinions in their own forums. That couldn't make me happier.

Back to Newsweek. Could it have avoided all this pain if it had been less reliant on the word of a single reporter in the field? Certainly. The magazine has been hurt, and bad. Some bloggers suspected all along that the Newsweek reporting smelled. (Internally, Newsweek may have had its doubters as well.)

In the end, though, everything has worked the way it should. The magazine has fessed up, bloggers can take credit, if they wish, for helping to force the truth into the open (bloggers are seldom immodest about their achievement), and those of us at TheHuffPost and elswhere get to write about it endlessly.

I guess that's sort of a slow-boat self-correcting mechanism, if you will.

Except that people lost their lives in this particular situation, and Newsweek cannot change that result.

Nor could bloggers have made an actionable difference, not at the time, anyway.

When a publisher, like Newsweek, hires the best journalists its money can buy, it needs to rely on their work. It's always been that way, and I think it always will.

And yet ... bloggers add an incredibly exciting dimension to the newsgathering process. As they grow greater in number and more powerful in influence, they (we!) will increasingly become a critical cell in the newsstream, not merely an outside irritant.

And that's just about perfect, it seems to me.

.....

*Disclosure: I worked for Time Inc., Time magazine's publisher, for many years. I swear, however, that that does not in any way influence my opinion of its chief rival.

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