...I have [to] wonder, what would big papers like the Washington Post do if TPM went under and they didn't have our exclusives to steal and run as their own stories on A2 on the following day?For today's example see Kate Klonick's Thursday exclusive at TPMMuckraker about the US Commission on Civil Rights hiring Bush administration minority voting suppression expert Hans von Spakovsky and the Post's citation/credit-free retread in today's paper.
This is, unfortunately, not an isolated problem. When was the last time you saw a front-page diary on this blog, or any other blog, that cited a corporate news story but failed to link to it (assuming a link was available)? Right, you're going to have to look long and hard. Now, when was the last time you saw a corporate news outlet link to a story broken by a blog? That's right, you're going to have to look long and hard.
Perhaps it's time for the corporate media to adopt, and actually adhere to, a journalistic "code of ethics?" Ironically, we bloggers (of all political persuasions, by the way) seem to be doing a lot better than the corporate media, even without a "code of ethics" at all. Fascinating.
P.S. I've heard that the Washington Post fears the blogs so much - sees them as competition, obviously, for their dying "dead tree" business - that they won't link to them out of principle. Has anyone else heard this as well?
P.P.S. On a related subject (corporate media lack of ethical standards), I've seriously considered suing these @#$%@#$'s for libel, slander, etc. The legal advice I've received - from some EXCELLENT lawyers, by the way, indicates that the Roanoke Times definitely could be sued over their "Bloggers on the Take" editorial: "there is enough to sue on, but I wouldn't make any promises about winning." The main holdup is that I would probably be considered a "public figure," which would make winning the case difficult, but besides that, the Roanoke Times editorial came VERY close to meeting the definition of "legal defamation": False statement of Fact (not opinion); Speaker knows it's false; Published to third person; Damage to subject (loss of business, etc). Bottom line: is it time for bloggers to start suing the corporate media for stealing their stuff, defaming them, etc?
You can read that piece here
The way it works is this. Some small outfit (or a blog) breaks a news story. A reporter from major media gets a hold of it and calls a source to ask, "Is this story accurate?" If the source answers yes, then the major media now can publish the story as their own. The reason is that copyright protects the expression of an idea, but no one "owns" the news.
And to be fair, it's not just big guys picking on little ones. The NYT and the WP, et al., do the same thing to each other all the time. The key, rightly or wrongly, is whether you do your own legwork, even if you have stolen the idea.
In the financial press, we didn't mind that much. In fact, clients paid us top dollar for these scoops, and our readers would profit handsomely if we broke something, then the WSJ published an article about it, so all our readers who bought in on an investment early on the cheap could sell.
Two or three times, however, when the story was an interesting news item but not not necessarily a profit-making opportunity, it just pissed me off enough that I contacted a reporter or editor at one of these major pubs to complain. Their responses were revealing. They thought I should be grateful to be ripped off by them. Along the same lines, occasionally reporters for major news outlets would demand subscriptions to our products for free, and if I balked, they'd be amazed. They actually feel as though they are entitled.
If we didn't do that, our subscribers would get pretty pissed.
But what really struck me, and still does, does the sense of entitlement that large media outlets have. I don't think it has anything to do with blogs, per se. They are just now getting the treatment that niche media has received for decades.
I'm not defending the practice. In fact, forget the tender feelings of Josh Marshall for a moment that his scoops are getting stolen, I think major media do their readers a disservice by failing to provide this information to them. The more information, the better.
and a blog on TheBivingsReport in October 2006,
http://www.bivingsreport.com/2...
except that they don't mention you or RK.
Funny that they can bleat about conflicts of interest but plagiarism doesn't seem to violate their ethics.