As everyone's heard by now, yesterday Maureen Dowd admitted to "inadvertently" lifting a passage from a blog post written by Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo almost verbatim. Glenn Greenwald comments:
I raise this only to illustrate how one-sided and even misleading is the complaint that bloggers are "parasites" on the work of "real journalists." Often, the parasitical feeding happens in the opposite direction, though while bloggers routinely credit (and link to) the source of the material on which they're commenting, there is an unwritten code among many establishment journalists that while they credit each other's work, they're free to claim as their own whatever they find online without any need for credit or attribution (see here for a typical example of how many of these news organizations operate in this regard).
I think it's a mistake to extrapolate from this any large conclusions about the relationship between bloggers and print journalists beyond the culture of non-attribution that Greenwald identifies here. It is true that bloggers are generally much better than traditional journalists at crediting the work of others.
At the same time, I don't think it's true that this incident proves that bloggers aren't in many cases dependent on the work of print journalists. There are a number of areas in which bloggers have yet to fill roles established by the mainstream press, but opinion and analysis aren't in that category, and that's what Dowd took from Marshall.
-- A. Serwer
