D@J | David Andrew Johnson

Arianna's welcome to Tucker on dailycaller points out journolazy he said/ she said

I’ve linked up to and commented on Jay Rosen’s blog posts about He Said, She Said journalism before, and I will keep doing it because his bandwagon is playing the song I’ve sung for years. I think it is a rampant problem in the current state of affairs, one that many journalists are refusing to accept about themselves as they lament the emergence of new media platforms that have challenged the old mediasphere. And yesterday I listened to the familiar strains of our favorite tune in an unexpected place.

In her guest post on the debut of Tucker Carlson’s new DailyCaller.com site, Arrianna Huffington called out the Right vs. Left journo-laziness very nicely:

Last year at CPAC, you said that journalists “need to get out, find out what’s going on, and not just analyze things based on what the mainstream media has reported.” That’s particularly true when the mainstream media are reporting and analyzing the news of the day in terms of right vs. left — the fallback canard of lazy journalism everywhere.

Anyone looking at today’s political landscape with clear eyes can see that on issue after issue — the war in Afghanistan, the bailout, health care, the war on drugs, etc., etc. — the binary division of the debate into right vs. left obscures more than it reveals.

via A welcome note from our friend and neighbor, Arianna | The Daily Caller | TheDC.com.

What’s funny (not at all ha-ha funny) is that the grumpy newsies want the bloggers to be right vs left, and have blasted away at the credibility of their challenge to established media on these grounds. Just as they want the politicians to be right vs. left and people to be right vs. left. Is this because the newspaper world is still so black and white?

As our culture grows, we must accept that we are not just binary. Or we must use the ones and zeroes to paint deeper, more rich images of our society, just as we have used binary formats to create jpegs with 32 million colors in them.

But for the news pros who grew up with monochrome terminals, maybe this is just too hard to grasp. But the audience is grasping it, and seeking more voice and more alternative.

And these are the lessons we are giving to the new generation of journalists we are educating as well as the older journalists who are coming back for more training. We’re not just giving them skills to tell stories, but we’re also talking about how they tell stories – because it isn’t just the medium, it is also the message.

How interesting that this balance discussion happens among the new news startups, while at the same time, the mainstream media outlet FOX News made a super polar move in inking a deal with Palin.

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