On Tuesday night, the Canadian Journalism Foundation hosted a session called Bloggers Rising: Shamans or shams? (note: that page allows you to access an archived webcast of the event).

While I appreciate the fact the CFJ puts these sessions on, this would have been a better event two years ago. The agenda has moved forward.

The moderator was technopundit-around-town Jesse Hirsh. The speakers were:

He blogged about the session here.

(Actually, so did RightGirl, Wonder Woman and Greg Staples. Some of the other bloggers mentioned in their posts who didn't post on the session by the time I started this post include Brent Colbert, Bob Tarantino and Stephen Taylor).

Captain Ed

Morrissey, from St. Paul, Minn., was up first. To give you some idea of who his target audience is, one ad currently on his site features a t-shirt with the slogan ACLU: Enemy of the state, with the 'C' replaced by an old Soviet hammer and sickle. "The Largest Selection of Liberal-Baiting merchandise on the Net!" the ad proudly declared. Another is for a conservative online dating service ("I can't date another liberal guy," screams the woman in the ad).

He started by talking about the blog assault on the '60 Minutes II' story on George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

The main issue were four memos by a Col. Jerry Killian. For complete background, read this Wikipedia posting (Note: it does have a warning label on it saying "the neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page").

Morrissey made the point that very soon after the story aired on Sept. 8, 2004, the Powerline blog -- based in Minneapolis, Minn. and with many military or ex-military readers -- started commenting on on the problems they saw with the memos (interestingly, Marianne Carr Knox, Killian's 86-year-old former secretary, said while she didn't type the memos, they reflected the truth about Bush at the time -- but the Wikipedia article claims Knox uttered some anti-Bush stuff in the CBS interview that wasn't broadcast).

Something Morrissey didn't mention (and I'm not alleging bad faith) is that CBS posted the memos to its website. I would describe that as an act of transparency; something CBS never got credit for.

Anyways, the story fell apart. CBS simply didn't do its due diligence on the memos. Four people lost their jobs, and Dan Rather -- anchor of the CBS Evening News, but who fronted the maligned report -- stepped down in March.

That was a notch on the belt of the conservative blogosphere.

A bit more personal notch for Morrissey was the attack on Eason Jordan, the chief news executive for CNN who resigned after coming under attack for remarks made about the U.S. military at the Davos Forums in Davos, Switzerland in late January.

Jordan said they had deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq, but then backed off that statement.

Here's a link to a Wikipedia article on the subject.

Morrissey referred to Jordan terming it as "deliberate assassination of journalists in war zones."

You can see some of Morrissey's postings on Eason Jordan here.

When he began blogging on the controversy, Morrissey asked his readers to to keep their eyes open. He also opened a Nexis account to do his own research on whether CNN had ever reported on this allegation.

"In the end, we compiled a list of evidence that Jordan had habitually made these claims, always in foreign venues, without ever providing any evidence. And CNN had never reported on any of these conspiracy theories that Jordan talked about."

For a week, only blogs were reporting the story, he said, although the Washington Post, among others, eventually joined in. Here's a link to a W-P story from Feb. 8.

Jordan resigned on Feb. 11.

I certainly wouldn't say the U.S. is deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq, but you might want to read this news release by Reporters without Borders about the killing of Reuters TV soundman Waleed Khaled by a U.S. Army sniper on Sept. 2.

Here's some excerpts from a 2005 RSF annual report on Iraq, which has become the most dangerous war in modern times for reporters to cover. Insurgents account for about 65 per cent of the journalists killed to date, but ...

 US troops were the next biggest cause of death (19%) for media workers in Iraq, with five reporters and media assistants killed in mysterious or controversial circumstances.

 Reporter Ali al-Khatib and cameraman Ali Abdel Aziz, of the satellite TV station Al-Arabiya, were shot dead near a US checkpoint as they were covering the aftermath of a rocket attack on Baghdad’s Burj al-Hayat Hotel on 18 March. The US army admitted on 29 March it had killed them but said the journalists’ car had been hit by mistake when troops fired at a car that sped through a barrier and crashed into a Humvee military vehicle.

Assad Kadhim and Hussein Saleh, of the US-funded TV station Al-Iraqiya, were killed by US troops on 19 April as they were filming a US base on the road to Samarra, about 100 km. north of Baghdad.

The 2003 killing of Mazen Dana -- an award-winning Palestinian cameraman for Reuters TV and a veteran of conflict zones -- outside Abu Ghraib prison by a U.S. soldier is an interesting case. The Army said Dana's camera was mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, so he was shot.

An excerpt from a BBC story:

Mr Glocer (Tom, chief executive of Reuters) said "it seemed quite incredible" that US troops could have mistaken Mr Mazen's camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher - the explanation given for the incident.

Dana had told U.S. troops in the vicinity of the prison who he was and what he was doing. But he was blown away after a tank arrived on the scene. Hey, mistakes happen.

And as one of Morrissey's readers noted: "Any journalist who points anything at a U.S. Soldier or Marine should be in a state of Grace with his God is all I'm sayin'."

I guess one could have asked Mr. Morrissey whether Eason Jordan would have been on safe ground if he said some U.S. troops have used a "shoot first, ask questions later" policy that has led to the premature deaths of journalists. Next time.

But here's what Morrissey said in one post: "...  I don't see anything that could even possibly be legitimately described as the military targetting journalists. Mistakes. Collateral damage. Panic. But if the US military set out to kill journalists, especially as a policy as Jordan insinuates, they would have been a whole lot more effective that what the evidence I have seen shows."

Morrissey talked about how he came to publish the Gomery stuff. No one (including me) publicly asked him if his source was a politico. That's the most interesting part: Who contacted him with the goods? I would suspect the Bloc Quebecois and the Conservatives would have had people monitoring the hearings who were smart enough to recognize the political dynamite in there. But it could have been a journalist too.

Anyway, he did address the question of whether bloggers are journalists.

"The better question is this. Can bloggers can perform journalism? I think our track record proves we can and we often do. It isn't what we do every time we post or even most of the time we post. Bloggers move between journalist, pundit and critic, self-promoter and back again, sometimes all within the same day.

"As our own editors and publishers, we have the flexibility to do all of that as we see fit. Our impact in each of these roles depends on the level of trust we have built with our readers, who enable us to fulfill each role by bringing us information that we need.

"On occasion, that information allows us to report original stories that can have tremendous impact on the world around us, and that's journalism and that's journalism no matter what ..."

Julian Porter

Porter made the following points: You can indeed be sued for what you say on a blog, noting the successful legal action by Barrick Gold against some Internet-based critic in B.C. The case went to the B.C. Court of Appeal where it was upheld (the defendant was his own lawyer).

Operating a blog under a pseudonym won't protect you, he said.

Much confusion exists in the law as to where a lawsuit should be filed in the case of Internet libel. The Australian courts allow an Aussie to file suit in that country, even if the posting originated elsewhere.

But if the post originated in the United States, the U.S. courts won't enforce judgments that aren't consistent with U.S. law, he said.

I asked Porter after the session about this scenario: Somebody puts a defamatory comment about a public figure on my blog. They put it on a three-month-old post, and I don't notice it. The post is only viewed 10 times, but one of those times is a MSM outlet. What would my damage exposure be?

Porter said if you are ever served notice that a comment is defamatory, you must strike it immediately. His feeling was that in general, if you seemed to have made reasonable efforts to control defamatory posts, you should be OK.

In a 2004 Online Journalism Review article, the following point was made about links:

For instance, it's unclear whether a Web site could be held to account for linking to defamatory content. In (Yale law professor Jack) Balkin's view, that would probably not provide grounds for a libel suit against the linker, unless perhaps he or she in some way vouched for the veracity of the content reached by way of the link.

That story was the second of two parts. The first dealt with U.S. shield laws and whether they would protect online journalists.

I didn't think to ask Porter about links. If anyone has come across any rulings pertaining to the Canadian situation, please drop me a line in the comments section below.

Andrew Coyne

Coyne was touted as one of the first Canadian media bloggers, but he graciously said that honour should go to Maclean's Paul Wells and others.

As a working journalists and sometime blogger, described his feelings on the blogging phenomenon as mixed.

"On the one hand, of course I can only applaud this flowering of citizen journalism, the flowering of diversity of opinion and the great exercise in freedom of speech that it entails," he said.

"But on the other hand, these people are working for free. And in some cases, they're better at it than we are.

"So I think that in some cases, there should be some kind of licencing program to restrict the supply and support the jobs, communities and ways of life that depend upon the working journalist," he said (in a way that I interpreted as facetious).

Some journalists took a dim view of bloggers, saying "nobody edits you."

Quippeth Coyne: "Of course, post-Jayson Blair, we found out that nobody was editing the New York Times, either."

What the blogosphere offers is horizontal editing, he said.

 "In a blog, of course, you simply post it and your colleagues, your fellow bloggers, will correct you in the error of your ways. If you get your facts wrong, 59 other bloggers are gonna tell you within three minutes."

As to the question posed in the panel's title, Coyne said bloggers can be both shaman and sham. "Any one individual blogger can be full of crap, but the collective process, I think, has a lot of validity to it. It's the marketplace of ideas on warp speed. You get a very fast comparing and contrasting of opinions and fact, and it's pretty quick to root out obvious falsehoods."

One example of this stretches back to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when a marketplace in Baghdad was hit by a shell or bomb of some type.

There was a debate over whether it was U.S. or Iraqi ordnance behind the blast.

A fragment of the bomb survived with a serial number on it, "and it set off a frenzy in the blogs trying to identify whose serial number this was," Coyne said.

While he couldn't remember the final dispostion, the issue was resolved within 24 hours, he said.

Coyne said there is a blogger's ethos of sorts, such as linking to an argument you're going to "tear to shreds," showing both the original error and the fix when a mistake is pointed out, and so on.

He credited bloggers with raising the level of debate on the op-ed pages of U.S. newspapers (he describe the NYT op-ed page as "practically unreadable.")

Given that Coyne accused most op-ed pages of dullness, I can here the voice of his one-time boss, Lord Black of Crossharbour, talking about the "soft, left, envious pap that poured like sludge through the centre of Southam newspapers" (one of my favourite Blackisms!).

Coyne referred to blogs as a meritocracy, with the best blogs becoming the best-read, but I'm not sure that's true. I don't think anyone can say the Canadian Blogging Awards of this winter picked the best blogs (Note: I came in fifth in my category :) ).

If he includes himself in that, Coyne also starts with a huge advantage over a true neophyte who doesn't have mainstream media exposure.

Coyne noted some downsides to the blogosphere, like the echo chamber effect, which he noted was part of human nature.

"The 'quick and dirty' response time" comes at the expense of nuance and reflection, he said. "The instance response, as we all know, is often the wrong one."

Questions

If you listen to the webcast, the questions start around the 34-minute mark (the session is about 97 minutes long).

One point Coyne made in that time was that what needs to be encouraged is civil disagreement.

He also noted that very few blogs are economically justifiable, although one could ask why should they be viewd through a commercial lense.

Coyne said he opposed putting content up behind firewalls -- something his own employer does, as does the Globe and Mail with its opinion writers. The NYT joined in that trend this week with TimesSelect.

While Salon requires either a subscription or a day pass, it lists the bloggers linking to their articles so people can see what's being discussed.

My big moment

In response to an earlier question, I suggested people might want to read The Blogs of War.

I then talked a bit about citizen journalism and Dan Gillmor's book We The Media (to listen to me sputter through the whole thing, I'm at the one-hour mark in the session).

Here was my question:

"A big topic in journalism in the past year or so has been the rise of what's called citizen journalism. And I guess the manifesto on that is by a guy named ... Dan Gillmor called We the Media.

"... He brings to mind the point of news as conversation, a theme picked up by fairly famous bloggers like Buzzmachine.

"Now most of the big-time journalism bloggers in Canada -- like Mr. Coyne, Antonia Zerbisias and Paul Wells -- are columnists. They're not reporters.

"Where do reporters fit into the blogosphere, and can you participate in an honest conversation if you're not allowed to personally express an opinion? And if not, what does that say about the traditional notion of objective journalism?"

Coyne said there are bloggers who are not newspaper columnists.

"They are doing a kind of reporting, more fragmentary, and lacks the narrative and the thought.

"I'd never want to only have blogs and have the kind of the narrative (they get in newspapers)," he said.

Blogging is never going to replace traditional, paid journalism, he said.

"I'm not saying it should," I replied. "But if you do a report as a reporter on topic X, and you post it to your own little chunk of the blogosphere, possibly within your corporate employer's web environment, and somebody like Ed says, 'well, gee Bill, where do you  go from here?', as a reporter, can you ethically then give what your opinion on that issue is? Can you take part in the conversation?"

Coyne said the lines aren't necessarily hard and fast, and some reporting stays into analysis.

Hirsh said sites ranging from Captain's Quarters in the U.S. to Rabble.ca in Canada gather a larger share of the audience because they cater to one side of the political spectrum. He also felt the culture of objective journalism is subverted by the Internet.

"The question is whether in the long run, who will have the most impact," Coyne said.

Morrissey said there seems to be a lot of analysis in the news pages at the expense of traditional-style news stories.

Coyne said it's as much about as self-interest as anything else. What I heard him say was something to the effect of 'if you're trying to pull something over on the readers, you'll pay the price'.

I found the exchange unsatisfying, but perhaps it was the nature of my question.

Here is the quote from Gillmor's book I should have read out loud as a preamble:

We will learn we are part of something new, that our readers/listeners/viewers are becoming part of the process. I take it for granted, for example, that my readers know more than I do—and this is a liberating, not threatening, fact of journalistic life. Every reporter on every beat should embrace this. We will use the tools of grassroots journalism or be consigned to history. Our core values, including accuracy and fairness, will remain important, and we’ll still be gatekeepers in some ways, but our ability to shape larger conversations—and to provide context—will be at least as important as our ability to gather facts and report them.

And here's his chapter called Professional journalists join the conversation. It discusses blogs at length.

Like I said, the topic the CJF presented was fine but out of date -- but some discussion is better than none.

To fulfill its own mandate of promoting excellence in journalism, the seminar would have been better as to see how blogs could be used to improve the practice of journalism in this country -- or failing that, how they should not be used.

The CJF had a session in the spring on civic journalism. They should have looked at the program of the Public Journalism Network's August 2004 event Exploring the Fusion Power of Participatory and Public Journalism for guidance.