PBS on Blogs

Josh Marshall posted yesterday that PBS’s Newshour would run a piece on blogs last night. Not reading TPM yesterday, I missed the show, but the transcript is up now. Who got the big plugs? Instapundit, Sully, Marshall (also quoted extensively), Salam Pax, John Irons (of ArgMax, but they don’t mention the name of his blog). The piece was actually filmed several months ago, possibly explaining why angrybear.blogspot.com didn’t make the cut. The story did cite an estimate that there are 5 million blog readers, which means there are approximately 4,999,800 blog readers not yet reading Angry Bear.

I did find one statement that I disagree strongly with, by Joan Connel, Exec. Producer, MSNBC.com:

One of the values that we place on our own weblogs is that we edit our webloggers. Out there in the blogosphere, often it goes from the mind of the blogger to the mind of the reader, and there’s no backup. And I would submit that that editing function really is the factor that makes it journalism. Are you making a mistake here? Do you really want to say that? Do you really want to use that word? Is that libelous? All of those basic journalism questions that we always ask.

And I thought MSNBC’s real value-add was not implementing permalinks. Seriously, Bloggers don’t need editors. The readers and other bloggers are the editors; when they find mistakes or omitted details, that’s what “UPDATE:” is for.

AB