extraordinary blogosphere delusions and the blogness of crowds

Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, of course, ruined it for everyone.

One day the wingnut “blogger”-slash-“reporter”-slash-“male prostitute” got caught asking a question that somehow didn’t manage to fit into the extremely stretched and misshapen standards of journalistic objectivity circa 2005. And all sorts of ugliness flew outta Pandora’s Box. Eventually, “Gannon” became the ultimate postmodern cipher, a man so elusive that any reference to him must be stuck in quotation marks. Even when discussing the issue with friends in the bar at OHMS you had to use air quotes. And bringing back that puerile conversational device was perhaps the very worst of all the evil emanating from “Gannon/Guckert”.

Another nasty bit of G/G evil was the questions about journalistic responsibility that began to be asked in his wake. Should bloggers be objective? What liability and libel issues face bloggers? What conflicts of interest? Are bloggers nasty un-American liberal hippy freaks or evil fascist un-American wingnut freeper morons?

In the microcosm, some of us at Panhandle Truth Squad have begun to face some of the same issues (though not male prostitution), and ask some of the same questions (though not “Why are Democrats divorced from reality?”). Problem is, even a single blog doesn’t always speak with one voice. A group blog like this one consists of an oh-so-democratic assortment of voices. Prodigal Son is the in-your-face founding activist. Demophoenix is the informative, detached scientist, convinced that people will see our side once all the facts are put before them. And I’m the dancing monkey, sometimes funny, sometimes playful, sometimes biting, sometimes throwing feces.

Add in the ‘rillos-- Blogarillo, Pazamarillo and whoeverillo else we can talk into posting, and you have a cacophony, a town meeting, the latest pyramid scheme to sweep across the Panhandle. We could never have one Ghostly Voice that speaks for us all like the Amarillo Globe-Republican does. And we wouldn’t want to.

As for journalistic truth-standards, try to remember, we’re just a blog. Give us resources like payroll, budget and full-time employees and we’ll meet those standards, and we’ll do it better than the Globe-Republican. For now, we’re just regular citizens asking the difficult questions our local media often refuses to ask.

Keep that in mind when you read the (very important) rumor-mongering below.

SPACEDARK