Concealing A Blog Scoop

Yes, we risk seeming peevish raising this subject.

But Editor & Publisher magazine ran a story about the blunder of the Journal-Sentinel in running an op-ed piece that claimed to be written by former Milwaukee mayor Frank Zeidler but in fact was not.

They made no mention of the fact that the blunder was first revealed on this blog.

Editor & Publisher, of course, is the house organ of the journalism profession, and the journalism profession doesn’t much like blogs.

Journalists in the mainstream media, after all, were (not that long ago) the “gatekeepers” who got to decide what people were allowed to see and hear. They have never liked being held accountable by people who are not part of the clan, whether it be conservative talk radio, Fox News or bloggers.

So their reaction is to ignore what they can ignore (smaller blogs) and deride that they can’t ignore (conservative talk radio).

Of course, mainstream journalists react to blogs the way straight-laced Victorians reacted to sexual sins: they are against them in principle but attracted to them too. Thus a fair number of journalists are getting their own blogs.

But on the whole, mainstream journalists would rather blogs had never been invented.