I am going to spend some time here linking my previous series on blogethics so you can easily peruse them at your leisure. I do not for one moment imagine the series will influence the doctrinaire ideologues but I submit it, again, for discussion.
Blogging is not new. Oh, the medium is new but blogging is not different from the pamphlets, some sublime, most scurrilous, written in colonial America by some of our most revered Founding Fathers. Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, to name two, wrote scathing, often anonymous, sometimes patently untrue, massively distributed and wildly successful pamphlets attacking their political enemies.
The muckraking journalists of Industrial Age America were bloggers in print. They used print because it was the most widely read medium of information in their day. Some championed female sufferage, some advocated limits on child labor, some cited the plight of the AmerIndian, some wrote in favor of civil rights. Still others wrote as their Founding Father predecessors wrote: to savage their political foes.
Bloggers are journalists in the purest sense of the word. This is according to the Supreme Court of the United States. The modern blogger has as much journalistic education as Horace Greeley, though perhaps less money than William Randolph Hearts or the Luce family. Bloggers have influence. When blogging is no longer the fastest, most comprehensive means of reaching large numbers of people, someone else will emerge. People love stories. People want to know the truth. There will always be bloggers, or pamphleteers or muckrakers. We have our place.
Our place must not include citing ourselves as sources, or our friends, or some other blog. Our place must eschew the kind of advocacy that demands incendiary headlines stated as fact on page one and piddling corrections stated as questions on page ninety-nine, metaphorically speaking.
So it is I submit my blogethics series here for your consideration. It will take me awhile to link all the posts. There are several.
BlogEthics: Attribution and Verification
BlogEthics: Monday, Day of Lunatics
BlogEthics: Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus
BlogEthics: Malicious Independence
BlogEthics: Consistency as Clarity or Caricature
BlogEthics: Politics and Ethics in the Blogosphere
BlogEthics: Obligation or Privilege
