Monday, January 11, 2010

The Daily Caller Joins the New Journalism



Tucker Carlson has launched a website called "The Daily Caller," or just DC for short. In a letter to his readers, Carlson lays out the website's "core job": Find out what’s happening and tell you about it. We plan to be accurate, both in the facts we assert and in the conclusions we imply. If we’re not, tell us. We’ll fix it immediately.

The site also has a blog, written by the "demented genius" Jim Treacher, called The DC Trawler.

There will also be an "advice" column (not all "conventional or even legal") by Matt Labash.

They offer a video section, "the best organized and most interesting around--Imagine YouTube with a working card catalog and no fifth-grade filmmakers."

This is from a "Welcome" letter from another non-lamestream journalist, Andrew Breitbart, who launched his own new site, Big Journalism, just this past week:

The consumer of news and information now has a clear and distinct choice between two approaches in delivering this valuable commodity:

On one side you have the New York-based intelligentsia, driving the narratives of our times with the guidance of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Anyone who knows this crowd knows them to be neither “objective” or “bias-neutral,” yet that line is propagated on television news and in print media and we are supposed to accept it. They have built walls between themselves and their customers, disdainfully and grudgingly accepting their criticisms only when forced to acknowledge their egregious errors (are you still out there, Mr. Rather?).

On the other side you have writers, researchers and pundits from every corner of our land, proudly disclosing their true core principles for all to see. They present the stories that move them and respond in real time to the interactive feedback of their consumers. They lose credibility (and audience) not for their opinions, but for journalistic errors and, more importantly, how they handle those errors. The fact is this: they are actually held to a higher journalistic standard because of the frank and honest disclosure of their point of view. When they mess up, they make their own side look bad. This ends up being a much tougher code of ethics than something dreamed up by a J-School panel of advisors.

This is welcome news and a welcome change from the mainstream media Leftist lockbox that created the vacuum the Daily Caller and Big Journalism and conservative bloggers everywhere are only too happy to fill.

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