After yesterday's Murrow Forum, Chris Matthews, Michael Dukakis and Janet Wu sat down with the Daily to talk about the evolving journalistic landscape.
In particular, the panelists expressed concern about the increasing prevalence of unedited content in the blogosphere.
"I don't rely on blogs," Matthews, the host of the MSNBC show "Hardball," told the Daily. "I have to know when I read something that it's been checked out professionally."
Dukakis, a former Massachusetts governor, agreed, equating bloggers with some of the print columnists he ignored during his time in the corner office.
"They're inaccurate, they aren't reliable [and] they're heavily opinionated," he said.
Meanwhile, Wu, a local broadcast journalist, spoke about the filters that prevent most blog content from making its way into her newscasts.
"We have the responsibility of verifying … information," she said. "I would argue that most of the stuff that you read on blogs does not end up getting picked up by the mainstream media, unless we got it to begin with."
Matthews also hesitates to pull stories for his show from blogs. "If I were to read a blog and just put it on the air that I just heard something as if it were a fact, would that be responsible? Would my viewers be happy to know that I just did that?" he asked.
Still, the panelists did not entirely dismiss new forms of media. "I'm not going to render a judgment about all people who blog," Matthews said. "A lot of really smart people blog and are reliable to the best of their ability."
And looking forward, Matthews expects improvement.
"Ten years from now, my answers to these questions will be totally different," he said. "It's organic, and the really good people in this field who are online will be distinguished … They'll build a reputation for themselves, they'll hire an editing team and they'll begin to be reliable. I just cannot rely on them today."
Dukakis, for his part, praised the grassroots Internet movement that catapulted Barack Obama into the national limelight.
"This new technology is enormously important when it comes to campaigns and elections and communication," he said.
As such, he said that the Internet is not the problem; instead, he blamed shoddy journalism wherever it exists.
"I'm not going to pay much attention to these judgments that I don't respect very much," he said. "And I don't care whether they're bloggers or columnists or radio sideshow hosts."
As for her view of the future, Wu worries that unedited blogs may eventually supplant more traditional forms of media.
Asked if established professionals in the field of journalism should protect readers from the barrage of questionable information online, she said, "We are only protecting them if they pay attention to us. And if they don't pay attention … we will be history within a matter of years."
