Daniel Schorr on Bloggers

25 July 2006 |permalink | email article

The journalist Daniel Schorr, who’s covered the news for 60 years and is National Public Radio’s senior news analyst, turns 90 next month. That makes him older than two other nationally famous news regulars: CBS’s Mike Wallace, 88, and Andy Rooney, 87.

“All my life I’ve liked news, Schorr tells USA TODAY, the last of Edward R. Morrow’s legendary team who is still fully active in journalism. “I also like news people – and I like the idea that they accept a person who is three times their age.”

He finds the new Internet world both fascinating and scary.

“What is good about it is people will not be able to suppress the news because you can always find a blogger who gets the story out,” Schorr says.

But, he opines, “what we have here is a medium in which there is no publisher, no editor, no anything. It’s just you and the little machine and you can make history. I find that scary. Nobody should get into print or be on the air without some kind of editor. I have an institutional belief that nobody can be above having a good editor.”

There is some truth in Schorr’s lament about the new new medium.

Many bloggers, including former journalists and writers, express themselves clearly and relish the freedom of being their own editors and publishers.

But the Internet is saturated with millions of undisciplined bloggers from the right and left - a few nationally politically known - whose code-like, insider rants are not decipherable. They make Schorr’s point that an editor might be helpful. But the blogosphere has no rules!

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