Ever wondered why your local newspaper won't even use the word "terrorist"?

By now just about everyone has weighed in on Alex S. Jones’ remarks in a piece called "Bloggers Are the Sizzle, Not the Steak." Some excerpts:

....this moment of blogging legitimization — and temporary press credentials — doesn't turn bloggers into journalists.

.....bloggers, with few exceptions, don't add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.

....Presumably many Americans, especially young ones, will look for something with more spice and feistiness, which means they may well be looking at blogs and no doubt adding their own kibitzing via the medium's famed interactivity. This can be fun, and it can also be important. It was political bloggers and their fans who insulted and harassed and eventually embarrassed the major media into paying attention to the comments suggesting racism that Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott made at South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. Media coverage forced Lott's resignation as Republican leader in the Senate, but it was bloggers who badgered the media until they did their job.

.....In these early days, blogging still has the charm of guileless transparency, which in the blogosphere means that everyone — no matter how cranky or hysterical — is presumed to be speaking his or her mind with sincerity. It is this air of conviction that makes bloggers such potent advocates.

However, if history is any indicator, such earnestness will attract those who would exploit it, and they include some canny, inventive people. There is already talk of bloggers who would consider publishing items for cash and commercial blogs that tout products.

Blogging is especially amenable to introducing negative information into the news stream and for circulating rumors as fact. Blogging's fact-checking apparatus is just the built-in truth squad of those who read the blog and howl loudly if they wish to dispute some assertion. It is, in a sense, a place where everyone has his own truth. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

So says Alex S. Jones.

While I can't speak for the blogosphere, I don't agree with the philosophy that truth varies according to each individual's version of it. Might Mr. Jones be complaining that each individual blogger has his own bias? It's hard to tell, because the reference is so elliptical, but if I didn't know any better I'd swear that he has confused bias with the concept of truth. What I like about blogs is that while yes, there is bias, there's also disclosure of bias. Bloggers admit what they think and why they think it.

Yet guys like Jones take themselves so seriously that they write their own thoughts as if they think they're writing facts. I know I'm not perfect, and I do tend to rail at things I don't like. But to see my efforts described as "vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar" -- from a Pulitzer Prize winning journalistic scholar at the pinnacle of his professional career -- is unsettling, and tempts me to resort to the tactics of which he complains. (And, which, by the way, Jones himself does in the above attack!)

I think the fairest way to proceed is to simply supply some of the musings of Alex S. Jones -- and leave others to speculate about individual truths.

According to Jones, incivility is bad if you're Paula Jones or G. Gordon Liddy:

This year a new element was added: bald incivility to the president, apparently just for the fun of it. Insight magazine, a publication associated with the conservative Washington Times, invited Paula Jones as one of its guests.

The Washington press corps was electrified with delicious anticipation at the spectacle to come. Only Monica could have generated a greater buzz. She had been invited, but declined.

The evening's most eagerly awaited moment came when President and Mrs. Clinton walked into the room, while the Marine Band played "Hail to the Chief." Just as expected, Paula remained seated, as did her tablemate, G. Gordon Liddy, who was another Insight guest. Paula and Gordon also declined to join in the traditional toast to the president. They had been brought there to snub the president, and they did their job.

But how about Al Franken? He's biased too, but he gets a fellowship at Harvard's Shorenstein Center (which Jones directs).

Shorenstein Center director Alex S. Jones said Franken’s presence broke new ground for the fellowship program.

“I think it’s a very disparate class in some respects,” he said. “We have journalists and academics, but for the first time we have a satirist.”

But some truths are more equal than others. Here's Jones complaining that conservative allegations of White House vandalism found "fertile ground":

"I think it was this calculated effort to plant a damaging story," said Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. "There was a sort of fertile ground for believing anything bad."

What about real truth? Is there such a thing? Where would Jones have us go to find it? Why, the always-correct New York Times!

"As far as I'm concerned, there's no better news organization on the earth than The New York Times," says Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former media writer for the Times.

Has the press lived up to its responsibility to fully explore the Bush administration's Iraq policy? Is the Web delivering on the promise of the age-old American ideal of freedom of the press? What does a photojournalist think about when faced with taking pictures of the worst terrorist tragedy in American history? When are photographs too controversial to publish?

Hmmmmmm......

Is Jones a sort of self-appointed, independent media "guardian"? To his credit, he does ask "Why Do Many Readers Hate Us Again?"

So why have we lost the public's high regard? Does the public have our number or does the public misjudge us? And what should we do now?

The public loved us most in November, when flags rippled on the corners of TV screens and from on-camera lapels. Journalists were asking few tough questions regarding civilian bombing casualties and civil liberties, and the American military was rolling to a stunning victory in Afghanistan. Despite the tragedy of Sept. 11, we had a lot of good news to cover, and even pieces on the tragic aspects of the story seemed to forge a common sense of outrage and purpose. The more thorny elements tended to be put aside until a later day.

This spring and summer, that day came. The triumphant story ran its course, and the what-really-happened story began to be covered, with disquieting results. We started to get reports that there were significant civilian casualties, and serious questions began to be raised about the wisdom of an invasion of Iraq. Darkening the news atmosphere further were the stories of Enron Corp., Global Crossing, and the betrayal of shareholders. The market fell. The news from the Middle East had seldom been worse. These past six months have not been a happy time on the news pages.

So, has the public simply returned to its pre-9/11 attitude when the press returned to its normal adversarial role as the news itself turned bad? When the lapdog turned back into a watchdog?

No doubt that is a big part of the drop in our approval rating. But we would be letting ourselves off the hook too easily to believe that the problem lies entirely with the public's distaste for us whenever we simply do our job.

(The above article received quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere, with a roundup of links here, and a good fisking here.)

As to what Jones thinks the news media ought to be doing, it's hard to tell. But he praises Dan Rather for ignoring the Chandra Levy story, while criticizing the stampede to proclaim Bush the winner in 2000, yet he doesn't seem fond of maverick behavior by Fox News.

Then there's journalistic neutrality on the war:

But David Westin, the president of ABC News, said it was important for his journalists to maintain their neutrality in times of war. "The American people right now need at least some sources for their news where they believe we're trying to get it right, plain and simply," he said, "rather than because it fits with any advocacy we have."

Mr. Westin added, "Our people don't have to lead the American people to the conclusion they should reach about these horrible terrorist acts."

Alex S. Jones, the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, said that by reporting the news with such an American perspective, Fox News was failing to explain the evolution of the other side's motivation against the United States.

"I think people need to understand what's going on on the other side of the equation, how the U.S. is viewed by its critics," he said.

"The enemies of America recognize that the propaganda war is where they have their greatest strength," said Alex S. Jones, director of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. "They can't win this war with guns. They can only win it by persuading their world that we are in a culture war, which we absolutely do not want to be in. They are trying to portray this country as the enemy of Islam and Arabs."

If you want to know how the U.S. is viewed by its "critics," by all means read their own words in Little Green Footballs.

They hate us. They want to kill us. I get it. When people want to kill you, it's very clarifying.

How much more clear can such an "equation" be made?

On the other hand, might the other part of the "equation" be that we deserve to be hated around the world? To be killed?

Jones does not say.

He doesn't like to tell us little folk (and to him, bloggers are little folk) what he thinks.

But I did find something.

About as elitist a remark as I've ever read, here's Alex S. Jones' view of complacent, self-absorbed Americans, and what to do about them:

We recognized [terrorism] as a serious problem, a problem to us as a nation, but even then, even in that context, we had simply ignored the question of a complex motivational issue about how we were viewed from abroad.

I think that what this suggests is a situation and a problem that we all understand very well. The problem, number one, of Americans in a kind of complacent self-absorption, who do not care about the way they're viewed from the world at large and do not really care a great deal about the world at large; and, number two, the long-recognized problem of a diverse country, getting larger and larger and more and more diverse all the time, in which people who are prospective readers and viewers of news look at the world through a prism that is not necessarily international by their lives, but is certainly international in its complexity and diversity.

We're going to try to plumb how local news organizations, of great importance to the communities they serve, are approaching how to deal with a diverse population, and also [how to deal with] an American public that needs to know things about the world but may be reluctant to find those things out.

(It isn't just the blogosphere he's after....)

UPDATE: As Beck at Incite noted, bloggers have sunk their teeth into this story like rabid pit bulls. Via InstaPundit, the following are some of the blogosphere's best canines. Matt Welch thinks Jones has a "warped view of journalism" while Jeff Jarvis sees Jones as a self annointed priest "keeping the rabble out of the cathedral." Patrick Belton accused Jones of doing the same thing he accuses bloggers of doing, while Ernest Miller at Corante sees bloggers as emerging journalists. And Joe Gandelman, noting that while bloggers have not paid the dues expected of journalists, it is baloney to accuse them of taking money for stories without a shred of evidence.

Journalists, of course, by their nature take money for what they write.

If I had to contrast bloggers as they are now with traditional journalists, it would look a little like this:

USUALLY NAMED (or at least personalized so you know who they are)

ACCOUNTABLE (a bit like Ebay; you build a reputation for reliability, persistence and honesty)

ADMIT BIAS (Most blogs have an admitted philosophy, style, or slant, which is plainly disclosed.)

CORRECT MISTAKES (A constant chore, whether with or without input from peers)

DON’T TAKE SELVES TOO SERIOUSLY

USUALLY NAMELESS (generally impersonal except for the regular column writers)

UNACCOUNTABLE

WON'T ADMIT BIAS

WON'T CORRECT MISTAKES

TAKE SELVES SERIOUSLY

UPDATE: From N.Z. Bear (via Glenn Reynolds), I see that I need to add to each category above: "WATCHES THE MEDIA" and "HATES BEING WATCHED" respectively.