A few weeks ago, I went with a couple of my friends to see the dreadful movie Contagion, which entails a cast of celebrities getting killed by a mysterious illness. And although the movie is hardly worth remembering, one particular quote stuck out in my mind.
The character Dr. Ian Sussman tells a blog news reporter “Blogging isn’t writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.”
As a blog writer myself, I took personal offense to the statement. LC Radar, though admittedly editorial, uses credible sources to gather facts and report the most up to date and accurate information on a given subject. We aren’t just writing about our feelings or celebrity gossip, but also filling our site with real world news, reviews and global issues. And our editor doesn’t let us get away with submitting a poorly written article – rather, our grammatical and structural issues are pointed out, edited, and corrected before the article is published.
But as much as I pride myself on our particular blogging website, fishing through others reveals made up facts, opinions not rooted in anything, and flat out lies. Extreme left and right wing blog sites are the craziest; some claim that Obama is an alien from another planet or that Sarah Palin is somehow related to the messiah. It is scary to think that people are reading these pieces and – more importantly – believing them.
Because people are going to blog websites for their news, a system of filtering should be instituted to force the entire blogging world to become more truthful. Currently, anyone can post an article claiming that weapons of mass destruction are in some woman’s backyard in Alabama or that a dog found the cure for cancer. And simply because the blog says it is credible, these outlandish stories automatically become fact pushed by gullible people.
So there is currently some truth rooted in the Contagion quote. But lumping all blogs into this unreliable category prevents sites like LC Radar from establishing itself as a well written, reader-worthy, journalism source. And though the articles are meant to be shorter than in print, just because they are online does not mean they fail to cover the most important information, despite a 500 or so word limit.
Major news stations are starting to participate in blogging sites, as well as jumping on the Facebook and Twitter train. People are looking to get facts in a fast, accessible way. The Internet is the future of media and news. And just because it is fast does not mean that it has to be low quality. After all, William Bernbach of Needham Worldwide says, “All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level. ”
It is up to those of us who are writing today to make the choice to use blogs to better our society instead of hinder it. Let us know what you think of LC Radar as your campus news source in the comment section below!
- Erica Freedman, Blog Writer
