Guess what. Another media bigshot is skeptical about blogs.
According to Thomas Leif, the chief television reporter at the SWR (Southwest German Broadcasting) in Mainz, bloggers are a danger to professional journalists everywhere. The following is a translated excerpt from Dr. Leif’s recent interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, entitled “Bloggers are often Narcissistic Egocentrists“:
“While serious journalists at least try to implement objective criteria, many blogs are driven by a hyper-subjectivity. The blogger places his person in the foreground. It is often about narcissistic egocentrists who want to satisfy the urge to express themselves. That is legitimate, but not a journalistic attitude.
Many blogs are filled with hostility, accusations and systematic provocation. For example, others are deliberately put down without the blogger ever having personally met them. Through that, however, he directs attention to himself and enjoys the hype that develops around him. For the majority of bloggers it is not seriously about clarifying the subject matter or analyzing an event. Most of them just present a private table dance. Naturally there are also very good blogs of high qualitative value. They are, however, just mini islands in an ocean of content to which journalistic principles do not apply.”
Of course. The egocentric blogger narcissists are to blame for journalism’s decline. That isn’t a ridiculous generalization from the mouth of a mainstream media dinosaur, it’s just plain truth. After all, where would we all be without German journalists, those courageous paragons of objectivity, fairness and virtue?
And why can’t we all just get along? Why can’t all those hostile, hype-addicted bloggers just stop putting others down for a minute? Why can’t they repress their selfish urges? Why not follow the German media’s shining example? Educate yourselves bloggers:
But of course they are skeptical.
Why wouldn’t they?
It is one of the most bigoted Western magazines.