This is not a blog

When a friend of mine started using www.Blogger.com five years ago, I thought this whole blog thing was a fad that would die out when everyone realized that online journals were just an outlet for teenage melodrama. Boy, did I call that one wrong or what?\nToday, blogs are bringing down media icons like Dan Rather and a top CNN executive, as well as reporting the kinds of facts that are banned by the traditional rules of journalism. While professional journalists cry foul, it offers cause to pause and ponder the question: Are the bloggers picking up the slack for the post-9-11 news media?\nI've heard a lot of journalists say they are the voice of the people, speaking out for the masses. I've even heard this at the Indiana Daily Student. But public opinion polls show the masses disagree. Most people will pick up any printed newspaper and proclaim it is a piece of crap because the public just doesn't trust the media.\nHowever, if the IDS staff put out a blog instead of a newspaper, more students would feel that it represents the voice of the community. The content would be exactly the same, but the medium would be different.\nIn 1929, surrealist Renee Magritte did a painting of a tobacco pipe with the French words for "This is not a pipe" at the bottom. It was a statement that you are not, in fact, looking at a pipe -- merely something that looks like a pipe. If Magritte were alive today, he might look at my column and say, "Ceci n'est pas un blog."\nEven though this column is not a blog, it looks like one. I write in it on a regular basis, and my audience knows where to find me. They can even send me feedback at letters@indiana.edu. There are only two differences between this column and a blog: I get a press credential for working here, and printing the paper is much more expensive. \nBut what is a press credential? It's something you get if you work for a newspaper that goes through the expensive process of printing and distribution. Any regular yahoo with enough money to throw away can start a newspaper and make credentials.\nWe had one such yahoo in my home of Orange County, Calif., who ran a newspaper called the Foothill Sentry. Every month, Bob Bennyhoff loaded this paper with enough conservative propaganda to choke a donkey. But based on the content of his paper, I'm confident he would have started a blog instead if he were born 60 years later.\nPublishing a blog costs less than 50 cents a day, and anyone can do it. The audience is potentially larger than that of expensive newspapers, and yet the media complains that bloggers "lack credentials." Don't be fooled here; the "liberal" media is waging class war on the middle class' right to participate in democratic discussion.\n"Ceci n'est pas une démocratie!"\nGranted, the bloggers have done some questionable things in the past year, like publishing exit poll data while polls were still open in last year's presidential election.\nBut in the case of publishing "off-the-record" remarks by CNN executive Eason Jordan, the bloggers raise a question of why the media is willing to look the other way when powerful leaders don't want to be quoted.\nI'll admit that these media rules are in place to protect our jobs, but as a result, America's journalists have failed to deliver some of the most important news to the public. The blogger revolution is merely the public's way of shouting to the media: "You are not giving us the facts we want, so we will find them ourselves."\nAre we listening?