The brouhaha-du-jour in the media world is the decision by the “Standing Committee of Correspondents” of the U.S. Senate Press Gallery to deny congressional press credentials to SCOTUSblog, the source of the best available coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court. This dispute has been roiling for some time; you can read up on its origins here.
The “reasoning,” if you can call it that, of the Committee’s decision does not stand up to the most minimal level of scrutiny. As just two examples, Tom Goldstein, who operates SCOTUSblog, wrote a response here, and Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor and legal blogger of many years (and also, full disclosure, a friend), dissects the decision here.
Those very lawyerly responses, however convincing they may be, miss the point. The decision was authored by a committee whose members include representatives of the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and Congressional Quarterly – all charter members of the old legacy media. These organizations have spent the last few years watching their business model, which had served them well for decades, quickly disintegrate before their very eyes. And they’ll be gosh-darned if they’re going to let upstarts like Goldstein and SCOTUSblog horn in on what is left of their exclusive territory, like the congressional press gallery. Why, Goldstein is a lawyer – he didn’t even go to journalism school!
Volokh’s post explains the existential threat that IMHO is really driving old media in this instance (and others): in many cases, bloggers like Goldstein (and Volokh, and maybe even some folks around here) do a better job reporting on certain subjects than does the legacy media, precisely because the bloggers are not traditional journalists.
By making it possible for anyone to communicate to the world at large, the Internet makes feasible (among other things) reporting and analysis by experts in the field — not just reporters who often lack the experts’ experience, education, or specialization, and not just by large mainstream media organizations that understandably lack a commitment to truly deep coverage of a particular issue.
If you’re interested in the latest decisions about computer crime law, you are no longer limited in reading what reporters who know little about computer crime law have to say about it; you can also come to this blog and read Orin Kerr, the leading American expert on computer crime law. If you’re interested in breaking news stories about appellate decisions, you can read appellate lawyer Howard Bashman’s posts on How Appealing. If you’re interested in linguistics stories in the news, you can read the linguistics professors at Language Log. If you’re interested in the Supreme Court, you can read the unparalleled resources put together by SCOTUSblog, which was founded by Tom Goldstein, one of the nation’s leading Supreme Court litigators.
And you can read these items without the filtering, oversimplification, and distortion that usually happen when nonexpert journalists write about technical issues — and that often happen even when the best, most knowledgeable nonexpert journalists write about such issues. Of course, you can still choose to read nonexpert journalists’ stories on the subject, precisely because you value the filtering and simplification that the nonexpert journalists provide; often, that’s what one wants, especially on subjects in which one has only modest interest. But sometimes, you want to go straight to someone who has decades of professional experience actually working on what he’s writing about.
This development is understandably terrifying to the legacy media. Still, the spectacle of representatives of (mostly) respected outfits like the Wall Street Journal refusing entry to their club to SCOTUSblog, whose work has been universally praised (including with awards normally reserved for traditional media, like a Peabody Award), on such an utterly unconvincing basis, is frankly embarrassing. It’s a tantrum, not a reasoned decision. It seems unlikely to hold up for very long.
Have other blogs been credentialed that don’t have the independence objections that SCOTUSblog supposedly has, or have blogs been consistently shut out?
Why are these folks allowed to be gatekeepers. This seems like a job for the US Senate press office.
It’s just another angle on the same issue – protecting the turf of those already there. It’s really sad that the print media are being trashed by the electronic revolution because print is such a better medium for careful examination of content. Who would rather thumb through an ePub if they had a book available? But the entire culture is so divided into narrow turfs that it no longer wants to thumb through a book in search of a single piece of information, much less have a few books open on a desk and sit still long enough to gather and compare a variety of information.
And so the print media is under severe strain, especially when it comes to the balance sheet, and can’t survive without protection.