Last night I saw Kathleen Hall Jamieson on PBS’s The News Hour. Jamieson is the Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center which, among other things, sponsors FactCheck.org. She made the comment that the mainstream journalistic media today are falling down on the job of being “gatekeepers.” While the observation itself is not surprising, I very much doubt that we would have heard the role of the journalist characterised primarily as one of “gatekeeper” even a couple of years ago. Up until recently, the main role of journalists was to gather information that nobody else could get. The “gatekeeper” part was ancillary to the news-gatherer role. But in the age of Google and weblogs, mainstream journalists have fewer and fewer exclusive sources of information. Increasingly, their role is as information filters rather than information aggregators.
The trouble is, I don’t think most mainstream news outlets have realized this yet.
