A few days ago I was commenting at another blog on the Bloggergate issue and was musing on the appropriateness of the term “media” where blogs are concerned. My worry was that because of a lack of ultimate accountability on the part of the blogosphere, that it had no incentive to be fair, accurate or disclose bias or conflicts of interest.
Today I was following some links and found this statement that touches on what Sara said in the “blog for food” comment stream, about bloggers holding themselves to a standard based on their perceived audience. The MediaBloggers statement sets a great standard to follow:
...When our members practice journalism, they have the same rights and responsibilities as any other journalist and must be accorded the same First Amendment rights and legal privileges as those who work for traditional media organizations. We accept the Wikipedia definition of journalism as "a discipline of collecting, verifying, reporting and analyzing information gathered regarding current events, including trends, issues and people."The Media Bloggers Association encourages members to comply with commonly accepted standards of fairness and transparency. We believe that it is up to readers to develop their own trust relationships with bloggers and we ought not to interfere in that relationship. We believe our role is limited to presenting standards as aspirations and offering guidance on how to achieve those aspirations through education, robust discussion and mutual support.
This seems like a fantastic compromise: Publish whatever you want, however you want and try to maintain a sense of fairness and accuracy in what you report.
The Media Bloggers statement is held out as “aspirations…and guidance”, which is all, I guess, anyone could really ask for. A suggested code of ethics for bloggers-as-media is better than nothing at all.