Yearly Kos Journalism Panel

This is a particularly good panel, with Jay Rosen from PressThink, Paul Waldman of Media Matters, Atrios, ReddHead from Firedoglake, and Matt Bai of the New York Times. I'm going to run out of battery before it's over, so I won't liveblog. But already, Rosen has made some great points:

-Cheney's invisible. His schedule is not public. He literally cannot be found. How can the press be a watchdog if they can't find the house?

-bloggers collate stories... they're in many ways just another form of an editor. They're using dispersed knowledge.

-The DeLay Rule and Josh Marshall's distributed citizen model of gaining information through constituents. This is when Josh asked his readers to ask their Congressmen how they voted on the DeLay Rule, which would have allowed him to stay the Majority Leader even if he was indicted. Bringing that out into the open essentially killed the Rule.

-Journalism does not belong to professional journalists.

I think there's a symbiosis that needs to be struck. Most bloggers cannot afford to fly around the world for original reporting, but they can contextualize, analyze and push things into the forefront.

Paul Waldman made the point that most people do not pay attention to politics. Which is true. As a comic, frequently following acts that say things like "dogs and cats are different than New York and L.A.," I find myself having to explain who someone like Karl Rove is if I want to tell a joke about him. Local news is still the biggest source of "news" among Americans. The Right built their own media and share the same critique about the "mainstream media" and every time they talk about the media, that critique is involved.

I read Adam Nagourney's front-page article on the event, and I generally thought it was pretty balanced, decent journalism. (Peter Daou doesn't quite agree, thinking Nagourney misreads the event and believes that it's about the netroots going "mainstream." I didn't get that from the article, I thought he was reporting how Democratic insiders look at the netroots. I see his point, however.) I went up to him and told him I liked it, and he said "That's all I'm trying to do, is journalism!" and cowered as if I was about to hit him. Journalists feel beat-up and put-upon nowadays, but the only message they take is "everyone hates me" rather than the content of the constructive criticism.

Atrios just mentioned the horror show that is the political roundtable. They'll pit straight journalists with right-wing commentators. It reinforces the narrative that the straight journalist obviously represents the liberal side. Atrios' problem is also with the format itself. Journalists come on to give their opinions, but they're journalists, so they can't give an opinion. So they end up parroting conventional wisdom, which is a form of disguising opinion, and which lazily goes on forever (McCain is a moderate, for example).

I'm losing juice fast, so gotta go...