A couple of days back, I wrote a post about the incredible shrinking industry of journalism, in which I stated my preference for deep, hard-boiled reporting by seasoned professionals versus well-intentioned, even well-written opinion pieces from citizen journalists and bloggers. Yesterday, I slapped together a few words about the national security speeches given by President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney, taking the latter to task for his evasiveness and intellectual dishonesty.
Turns out the second post has helped to prove the point made in my first. See, I am a reporter by trade, but I don't cover politics or world events for a living, so I freely admit that my Obama-Cheney post was based on distillations of the speeches in the National Post. Truth be told, I haven't had the time to view or read either speech in its entirety. So while I stand by what I wrote yesterday, I have to acknowledge that it's an incomplete work. In my full-time gig, I like to think I'm scrupulously thorough in my reporting. In this role as a citizen blogger, I have certain limitations and my reach often exceeds my grasp.
Not so for Slate's Fred Kaplan and John Dickerson, who fill in the many gaps in my blog post with their artfully written and supremely informed articles about the Obama-Cheney faceoff. Kaplan's authoritative Cheney takedown and Dickerson's clever analysis of the where each side's arguments succeed and fail are effective not because the writers are empirically correct or impossibly brilliant, but because they carry the weight of years of solid journalistic digging.
By all means, read what the bloggers have to say, because there are quite a few out there - I obviously hope I'm one of them - who add something to the conversation. But in my view, the seasoned pros are still the ones who best frame that conversation.
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