Feral Beast: Bloviators Anonymous? The CIA nods to blogs

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Bloviators Anonymous? The CIA nods to blogs

That bumbling firm for spooks in Langley, Virginia, now takes bloggers seriously, even if most professional hacks still tend to look askance at aggregators with cyberlinks and ranters with agendas. Check out this and learn how the CIA watches anyone who files as a 'citizen journalist' on a weblog and especially monitors officials who might leak to them. The intelligence agency has updated its regulations and now releases formerly classified information to bloggers under the Freedom of Information Act. (Hat tip to abc's "the blotter".) What's more, an online tool has traced edits on the Wikipedia website to the CIA's office network (and also to the Vatican.) Beware cyber-moles. You can be traced.

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Feral Beast? Try Lemming

If the press were an animal, what kind of animal would it be? I’ve got my answer. A legion of lemmings, furry and well-intentioned, but ultimately condemned by their nature to follow each other mindlessly off a tall cliff, over the Paris Hilton peak or into the Invade Iraq crevasse. The words “feral beast” certainly wouldn’t come to mind. It’s not particularly accurate or particularly evocative. But that is how the departing British prime minister, Tony Blair, sees journalists: as malicious tormentors who have tried to tear him limb from limb.

--Gal Beckerman of the Columbia Journalism Review

“Journalism is a form of cartography,” write Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach of Pew. “It creates a map for citizens to navigate society. Inflating events for sensation, neglecting others, stereotyping or being disproportionately negative all make a less reliable map.”

"Journalism is good at solving small problems or taking small bites of a big problem. It’s not good at solving big problems." Adapted from David Simon, creator of The Wire.

Retrospective : five decades of journalism as reported by CJR

Fake AP Stylebook reminds us: Unless you're doing a story on the Muppets, you are not a gonzo journalist.

"The once idealized information superhighway has become a parking lot of error, misinformation, rumor and junk." Poynter Institute, advocating a broader definition of who is a journalist.