Aftenposten's Harald Stanghelle goes to war on the world of "filthy online journalism", where "ethical standards are despised".

Alexandra Polier's well written denial of the rumours about an affair with John Kerry have so far been effectful. This robs Matt Drudge of another trophy on behalf of filthy online journalism. But he represents a powerful phenomenon.

Matt Drudge made the net famous and infamous as a news medium after he on January 17 1997, 20:01, published the story about president Bill Clinton's relationship with the young intern Monica Lewinsky. .. This happened from Matt Drudge's one room apartment in one of Hollywood's less glamorous neighbourhoods. .. The still young man from Maryland believes that anyone can be a journalist if one has a computer, a modem and a phone line. .. Demands for ethical standards are despised. Anyone should tell anything about anyone, is the general idea, and this "information" can be published, is the line of thought with the man who's motto is "journalism stinks".

Matt Drudge runs a garbage website which is despised by the serious players in the business. .. He continues [in the Drudge Manifesto]: "The internet will save the news business. I envision a future of 300 million reporters where anyone can report about anything". ..

This is fortunately not so. ..

Barely ten years ago Bill Gates predicted the death of paper news in about the year 2000. The net enthusiasts find it difficult to accept that "new media don't make old media irrelevant, but change their role", as Dagbladet's John Olav Egeland phrases it.

In the shadow of Matt Drudge, this is well to remember.

To which there are many available responses, of which one of the more polite is "we'll see about that". It's an old (internet-old) debate, and I have little new to add, except to note a tone of desperation here, and to point out that while both mass media and online media have faults, their faults and strengths complement each other. High formal ethical standards can lead to quality reporting, but also encourages snobbery and neutrality (the opposite of objectivity), and fuels the feedback loops of closed communities. Everyone finds it difficult to tell "bad reporting" from "reporting I disagree with", so high standards can be abused to make journalists walk in line. What's proper to say becomes more important than what's true. The online lack of formal ethical standards can lead to lower quality reporting, but encourages independence and diversity. And online credibility has more to do with what you say and how you know it than who you are, for who you are is a nobody. This puts the truth in focus, for what else is there? It also encourages doubt. Skepticism and objectivity are not abundant in the mass media.

It's also a mistake to focus only on online journalism. There's original reporting online, but mostly on professional or semi-professional sites, and online media is much more than the professional sites. What amateur online media like blogs do best is filtering and commentary. And even a professional blog like the Drudge Report is nearly all news filtering.

None of this is news to most of you. It may be to Stanghelle. Norway still has the barrier around its mass media that began to crumble in the US with Drudge, and started to fall apart for real two years ago. We're still in that era where blogs are continuosly being discovered and written about in "diaries with pictures of your cat" style articles. I've been in three "but not all bloggers publish pictures of their cats" articles myself over the last couple of years. The meme that everyone can set up a website for close to nothing and do what editors, pundits and reporters do, in blogs and online mags, hasn't fully arrived. We're moving in the right direction, though. TV2 Nettavisen's online community site Spray launched a free blog service recently, Sprayblogg, which seems to have become popular. Most of the blogs I've seen are diary-like, but how long before people realize the potential of these tools?

Bill Gates' prediction is a strawman. Gates is a rich guy who runs a successful software company, that's all, not some great thinker on the information society. A better prediction: Today's mass media are largely defined by high barriers of entry. The internet significantly lowers those barriers. This will inevitable affect the mass media. We're not looking at an anarchic future with hundreds of millions of equally important voices - network power laws will ensure an elite of important voices, and a great mass of unimportant ones. But we're looking at a structure that is very different from what we have today. And it's a structure in Matt Drudge's image, if not his shadow.

The funny thing about the Kerry sex rumor, btw, is that Norway's mass media - the ones supposedly working after higher standards than Drudge - reported it from the start. Their ethical colleagues in the US, remember, mostly ignored the rumor. I remember a particularly painful sequence on CNN where a reported anguished about the power of internet rumors, and then anguished about his own role in spreading them by even bothering to mention that they existed, etc. Our major media did no such anguishing. They didn't go straight into sex scandal mode like the British media, but they all mentioned it. And I saw no improvement worth mentioning in the reporting of our media over the reporting of the right-wing blogosphere. Norwegian media all pointed out that this was an uncomfirmed rumor, published by a not always reliable pro-Republican website. So did blogs. Our pundits wrote about the sad state of US partisan politics where rumors like these steal focus from important issues. So did blogs. Our media reported Polier's denial, and no longer seem to take the accusation seriously. Same with blogs. Higher ethical standards? Or bigger egos? Oh well, as I said, we'll see. Stanghelle may invest effort in his theory, I in mine. I doubt there's some final "victory" to be had here, but there's a lot of fun to be had in the meantime.

Oh, and BTW, Drudge DID get it right about Clinton and Lewinsky.

It was Weasely C. that related the rumor about Kerry to journalists. It's not as if Drudge dreamed it up.

And wasn't it the mainstream media that was announcing to the world that Saddam's Fedayin were massing on the banks of the Potomac preparing to invest Washington (or something like that). Apr. 9, 2003 should have been the day that millions around the world cancelled their newspaper subscriptions, demanded a refund for their news-weekly, and threw away the TV. Instead, they said, "You know, I've been lied to for three weeks now but, damn, it sure felt good!"

Anyway, my point was that big-media journalists are sooo hypocritical and arrogant.

Boy, the fear and hatred of Drudge's heretical storming of Stanghelle's holy priesthood of proper-think in "journalism" just drips off the page.

From the states, I can tell you that the Drudge story came out, and immediately the Internet and people began talking, but NOT media. And the former really did a good job of saying to each other.. "wellll, this is interesting, but it's gonna take a good 72 hours before we can judge what it means, if anything." There was some random thoughts on impact, but vitually EVERYONE hedged bets, spoke softly, and knew the story would explode if true and major, die if false or innocuous, and the latter appears to be the case. And I think that "right-wing US media (Fox and beyond)" apperently did a much more responsible job than many of their oh-so-socially-responsible European counterparts of handling highly dubious information hurtful to the left side of current issues.

So now we all know that Drudge is dubious.... he's broken some big stuff, got other stuff wrong, and we can all judge Drudge's sludge accordingly (had to squeeze that in ;-).

But Stanghelle's terror is not lost on me, nor is it unjustified. The days of his ilk's unfettered propogandizing are over, and his reaction is that of the church when Martin Luther nailed his thesis to the door. For many of the same reasons, it would seem.

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