Below The Beltway

The line between bloggers and journalists is continuing to blur, today the Washington Post reports that two bloggers will be sitting with the media during Scooter Libbey’s upcoming trial:

When the trial of Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice opens next week, scores of journalists are expected to throng the federal courtroom in Washington, far too many for the 100 seats set aside for the media.

But for the first time in a federal court, two of these seats will be reserved for bloggers. After two years of negotiations with judicial officials across the country, the Media Bloggers Association, a nonpartisan group with about 1,000 members working to extend the powers of the press to bloggers, has won credentials to rotate among his members. The trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the highest-ranking Bush administration official to face criminal charges, could “catalyze” the association’s efforts to win respect and access for bloggers in federal and state courthouses, said Robert Cox, the association’s president.

The new validation doesn’t necessarily clarify the blurry line between bloggers and traditional journalists at a time when millions of people are discovering that they can project their opinions and expertise around the world with just a few keystrokes. The debates over the traditional checks-and-balances process that journalists follow are continuing, and some bloggers are resisting efforts to be put under the umbrella of the traditional news media.

“The Internet today is like the American West in the 1880s. It’s wild, it’s crazy and everybody’s got a gun,” said Thomas Kunkel, dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school. “There are no rules yet.”

The common journalistic practices of verifying facts, seeking both sides of a story and subjecting an article to editing are honored mostly in the breach. Innuendo and rumor ricochet around the Internet as blogs link from one to another, at times making defamatory voices indistinguishable from the many others involved in this experiment of free expression.

You mean the same bloggers who figured out that CBS News was using faxed National Guard memos to spread rumors about President Bush ? And need I say any more than two words: Jayson Blair

Yes, there are excesses and inaccuracies in the blogosphere, but they are usually corrected more quickly and more openly than the mainstream media, as James Joyner notes:

[T]he principal difference in this regard between blogs and mainstream journalists is that the norm in blogging is to leave up the mistakes and follow up with annotated updates. By contrast, the mistakes the mainstream press make disappear into the ether, generally unacknowledged.

Of course, that’s becoming harder with bloggers watching.