Sarah Palin's Babygate And The Future Of JournalismSarah Palin's Babygate And The Future Of Journalism

The story of Sarah Palin's daughter's pregnancy is an example of the uneasy partnership between journalists and bloggers. The events make it clear what journalists' roles ought to be in the post-blogger era. But it's unclear whether journalists actually did their jobs here, because this is such an ugly story that it's hard to see past the sordid surface to find out what happened.Here's what we know: The liberal Democrat blog Daily Kos ran a report claiming that Palin was covering up her own daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy and childbirth. They based the report on a whole bunch of circumstantial evidence, including photos of Palin looking svelte in what was supposedly her seventh month, reports of her daughter looking a bit preggers, and reports of Palin's behavior which, the DailyKos's correspondent said, was not believable behavior for a pregnant woman.

Now, I'm a liberal Democrat myself, and there's no way I'm going to vote for McCain. And the more I learn about Palin's politics and career, the less I like it. Still, I was a bit nauseated by the DailyKos report. They didn't have the facts, they were just reporting rumor, and that was a thin basis for putting a 17-year-old girl's sex life up for national scrutiny. Sure, Sarah Palin signed on for this when she agreed to the VP nomination -- anything in her life was fair game. But her daughter didn't sign on for this treatment.

Later, the McCain campaign issued a statement, saying Palin's daughter wasn't pregnant -- at the time DailyKos said she was. But, said the McCain campaign, Palin's daughter is pregnant now, and she's marrying the father.

Is this an appropriate topic for the news? I have to hold my nose and say "yes." Palin based her political career on promoting her views of what family values and sexual morality ought to be. She should, therefore, be judged for fitness in office based on her own family's adherence to those principles.

And yet, dragging a teenage girl through this filth is just plain sickening. It's one of the reasons I got out of daily journalism 20 years ago. It may, in fact, be necessary work -- but I just don't have the stomach for it.

The story was driven jointly by bloggers and journalists. Bloggers reported the rumors, and journalists picked up the story once it had the imprimatur of legitimacy. My colleague Nicole Ferraro is disgusted by the collusion:

Is the Internet to blame for this? I don't think so. Ugly political rumors existed long before TCP/IP. (Indeed, the Republicans' claims to be shocked, shocked at the victimization of a helpless girl is hypocritical, coming from the same crowd that bullied Chelsea Clinton.) The Internet provides a service, it gets the rumors out in the open where they can be verified, refuted, and otherwise dealt with.

The Washington Post quotes Republican leaders who believe Palin is being unfairly persecuted. It's in that article that I find a clue as to what journalists' future role should be in an era where anybody with an Internet connection can have a global platform for their views:

And that suggests what the role of journalism ought to be going forward: Being the gatekeeper meant that we were the first source of information. We can't do that anymore. That role usually goes to bloggers, who work fast and are often happy to print rumors.

But we can strive to be the last source of information, to verify and check facts and refrain from printing rumors labeled as fact until we're sure that they are facts.

Of course, sometimes it works the other way around, as the Post notes: "Bloggers on the left and right increasingly drive media coverage by turning up the volume on questions until they are difficult to ignore. Sometimes they are right, as when they questioned what CBS's Dan Rather said were National Guard documents in a 2004 report on President Bush's military service that led to Rather's ouster as the network's anchor." Sometimes bloggers do the fact-checking for bad journalism.

And that's appropriate too. The more voices that participate in the political debate, the better off we are as a nation.

Which is why this opinion piece in the Post a couple of weeks back is just plain wacky: environmental lawyer Dusty Horwitt argues that the government should mandate an energy tax which would make owning computers and Internet access too expensive, to reduce the number of blogs. I am not making this up (as Dave Barry likes to say):

Great idea, Dusty. Because everybody knows that the problem with politics today is money doesn't play enough of a role. If we make blogging more expensive, then only people with deep pockets will be able to afford to express their opinions. And everybody wins when the poor and middle class are disenfranchised.

What do you think should be the roles of bloggers and journalists? Does old-school journalism matter anymore? Was the DailyKos right to report the rumors when it did? Let us know.