Blogging reflections

Blogging is a very curious experience. When I began blogging a long time ago, I confess I never thought I was going to have so many readers. Yes, this blog is not a very good example, but if you sum up, the visits from all my blogs (Las Noticias de Eurabia, Eurabian News, Eurabian News II, The Anti-Jihad Pundit and the last Anti-Jihad Pundit -the only one in which I really write lately-), you can see that in less than a year we (my companions at EN are also included) have been quite prolific.

There are sometimes in which blogging has been very good both to read different point of views and also to get to some conclusions about the subjects in which I have been reading and writing.

In Spain, though the right-wing blogosphere is somewhat developed, I cannot say that we have had so much importance as in US. Internet is not used in such proportions, although I really think the number of Internet reading and users is growing.

Anyway, whatever our importance is -at least, some are very important- we are not journalists. That is why I was so surprised when I read so much controversy about some news which were very shocking: the Iranian Dress Code. The news were that Iran was going to impose Badges on Non-Muslim people and it resulted in a hoax. As a result the Canadian National Post, the paper which published it, suffered severe critics.

I think it’s fine to be critical to journalists who are a bit impulssive and do not control the news they publish. But the criticism over the bloggers that simply linked the news was nothing but excessive. One of the bloggers, I admire most, Alexandra, was even called a Nazi because she considered that, whatever the story was or not really true, she felt Ahmadinejad was enterily capable of doing something like that.

The problem was that, even if the part about the non-Muslim was true, the Iranian Dress Code was true for other sector of the population: women. It’s curious that the people who were so eager to call her a Nazi, were not really seeing the bad consequences this fact is carrying for women, as I said in the post linked above. It looks like it’s very bad to put badges on Non-Muslims (well it’s disgusting in fact), but it’s not so bad if we are considering that the affected population would be only women. And, in fact, the main part of the Iranian Dress Code was, yes, the Muslim outfit imposed on women.

Today I was just reading some links I had in my computer, and I was totally surprised to see another reflections about this same issue:

I hope that readers don’t come to this blog looking for journalism. I am a blogger, not a journalist. This distinction has clear implications in my own mind. I am not a professional writer nor do I derive my income from this activity. Blogging for me is an act of will: I blog because I want to blog.

[...]When I commented on the NP news about Iran, I received comments that I had “fallen for it.” The implication being that those who didn’t write about it knew that the report was false. Such knowledge would have required writing about the falsehood, which the mockers did not do. Call me naïve, but the headline made sense to me because the question had been debated in the Iranian parliament before. Most of the triumphalist lefty posting on the subject had more to do with ideological partisanship “rubbing right-wingers’ nose in it” than it did with the nature of blogging. It contributed nothing to make blogging less vulnerable to such things.

Yes, this blogger is right. A blogger is someone who is worried, happy, desperate, stressed, etc, about reality. And, instead of writing a diary in a sheet of paper or phoning his/her friends, turns on the computer and writes about the things that make him be worried, happy, desperate, stressed, etc.

This is why I think we cannot be considered journalists. A journalist has to do it because it his/her work, not because of being a hobby. If the content of one-of-his-posts’ link is proved wrong, he just have to tell it and everything is fine. Nothing to quarrel -or to insult- about.

Anyway, having said we are not journalists -at least in general- there are some who are just continously publishing exclusives about this or that issue. Those people are in fact journalists, or al least do what the journalists should do: bring into the public news that normally would not be printed because they are unpolitically correct most times. In Internet there are a lot of platforms to publish blogs for free and others in which you can have a blog in minutes for a very little fee.

As a result,

US judges have stablished that bloggers do not have any obligation to speak about their sources and are protected by the Amendments that protect normal journalist, the First Amendment and California’s Shield Law.

In Spain we will have to wait some time before something like that is said.

Tags: blogging, blogosphere, journalism