Posted by Eugene Volokh:
NPR Ombudsman on Blogs:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_05_01-2005_05_07.shtml#1115162607
As Orin quoted below, the [1]NPR ombudsman writes:
American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate
fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each.
Radio and television try to ensure that opinion remains secondary
to reporting. Conclusions should be drawn warily. Bloggers tend not
to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact. It's
part of the appeal of the blogosphere. . . .
Can the MSM adopt any blog values to attract the younger audience?
Or should we wait and see? Perhaps these younger people will
outgrow these youthful informational indiscretions and come to
their senses -- and back to media that can serve them best . . . .
I would think that younger people (and older people) would prefer
media that soundly analyzes what it's writing about, rather than
drawing unhelpful analogies. American newspapers theoretically
segregate fact reporting from opinion (though not as well as I might
like). But on the opinion pages, facts and opinions are indeed mixed,
not so much "conflated" as integrated into pieces that analyze and
comment on facts. And in many magazines (such as The New Republic or
the Nation or the National Review), even more of the pages are opinion
pages -- analysis and commentary based on the facts but expressing the
author's opinion.
The proper analogy to many blogs is opinion magazines. We don't
purport to offer unopinionated fact reporting, any more than the
Nation purports to offer unopinionated fact reporting. We try to get
our facts straight, but our value to readers is precisely in the
commentary (often opinionated) and not in the scrupulously objective
uncovering of original facts. There are exceptions, but what I
describe, I think, is the rule.
There is no "informational indiscretion" here, whether that phrase is
used seriously or half-jokingly. Faulting us for not adhering to the
standards -- or perhaps the aspirations -- of NPR simply betrays a
misunderstanding of the medium. We don't bill ourselves as an NPR, and
our readers don't expect it. Readers expect us to be analogous to the
essays on NPR, or in other sources of opinion. And I think they get
precisely what they expect.
References
1. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4628781
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