Panic In D.C.! Bloggers Officially Invited To Cover The President

The concern over “blurring the line between news and punditry even further” is a legitimate one — the blogosphere is not known for it’s calm, centrist views. Of course, neither is much of the cable world and no one has ever accused Chuck Todd or Major Garrett of filing biased pool reports even though plenty of people will tell you the stations themselves are slanted in one direction or the other (in fact the White House made a specific point of excluding Major Garrett from its criticism of Fox).

Meanwhile Politico has been filing pool reports since 2007 and while the site itself is not know for its removed take on things, I don’t recall any complaints being made. Not to mention my twitter feed is overwhelmed by the regular tweeting of folks like Jake Tapper, Mark Knoller, Chuck Todd, and Major Garrett, all of whom are able, to my eye, to separate view from fact. As every reporter has done time out of mind. I asked our own White House correspondent Tommy Christopher what he thought:

The point is, pool reporting is more of a chore than anything else. The trick isn’t to figure out the reporter’s ideological bias, but rather their level of annoyance. Some have fun with it, some are really dry, and every once in awhile, really cranky. For every state dinner, there’s a thousand phone calls to the prime minister of Micronesia that you have to sit through.

So a tempest in a tea pot? More like growing pains. Seems to me the WHCA should be lauded for making this decision when it did, instead of when it was forced to by the reality of the media world. Meanwhile, who even knows what the media world will look like in a year. I suspect in all likelihood pool reports will be twittered out instead of filed, for the world to read (follow Mark Knoller for a glimpse of what that might be like).

It should also probably be noted that as traditional newspapers become more SEO aware in an attempt to stay alive, so has the blogosphere begun adopting some of the long-held journalistic practices as the expand. Moreover, the level of transparency that comes along with the web, and web coverage, makes decisions like these less scary. Also, it’s inevitable. Because eventually if the Internet isn’t let in to these things on equal footing and allowed to prove themselves we are going to be getting all our reports from either the New York Times or Politico, and no one (including the NYT) wants that.