Does the Internet Make Better Pundits?

Really interesting piece from Justin Fox at Time's Curious Capitalist blog. I'm not sure I agree with it, but since all commentary of the subject of "Toward a Better Future in Journalism!" is fundamentally speculative, I thought I'd throw it in front of you and see what you think. To set the stage, he's riffing on a blog post by Karl van Wolferen about the changing organization of journalism and whether America's morbid fascination with objectivity would be cured by simply letting reporters share their thoughts in their stories:

The bureaucratic model of American journalism Van Wolferen describes is falling apart, of course--it was a product of newspaper journalism's monopoly age (and TV and magazine journalism's oligopoly age), which began around the middle of the last century and would now seem to be over. The new age seems to be encouraging a better sort of punditry, just because of the fact-checking tendencies and conversational nature of the Internet. But I don't really see us being overrun by Van-Wolferen-style thoughtful reporters. Traditional media outlets like the NYT (and TIME) are more encouraging of such an approach than they used to be, but their resources aren't exactly growing. Heck, I used to have a thoughtful-reporter job (at Fortune) and traded it in for something closer to punditry because I figured it would be good for my career.

I agree with Fox that it's a good idea to allow reporters to clear their throats from time to time and write their own thoughts in a separate blog like, say, Time's Swampland. A former editor called this approach "showing your work" -- explaining the questions you didn't find suitable answers to, explaining where you think the debate is headed, and otherwise sharing thoughts that might not fit in an upside-down triangle journalism piece.

However, I don't think new age journalism necessarily produces better pundits. Certainly expert blogs and sites like FactCheck can help keep pundits in line, and the Internet gives these watchdogs a public platform. But the Internet gives every dog a public platform! As Slate's Farhad Manjoo pointed out a couple week's ago, the size of Internet, and the extremely low barrier to setting up a site, means every opinion, fact and conspiracy theory has a place it can call home. In Manjoo's words: "Because we can now get our news from sources that reflect our political views--and we can avoid sources that we find suspect--lies and misinformation tend to proliferate and linger." I don't think that's a recipe for better punditry, and I certainly don't know how you can look around at the healthcare debate on television and think: "Thank heavens for the Internet, and all these wonderful pundits it has groomed."