Edited blog at the Bee is creating a big buzz

For more than a century, California has been one of American democracy’s most dynamic electoral proving grounds. Now, the influential role of Internet-based commentators in the current recall campaign also has turned the state into a fascinating laboratory of political journalism.

Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals’ 9th Circuit put California’s first gubernatorial recall election back on track. But a controversy raging over Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub’s widely admired blog raises the question of whether the simultaneous experiment in campaign reporting is being aborted or merely fine-tuned?

Because postings can occur virtually instantaneously at all hours of the day or night, skillful and diligent bloggers can produce commentary and journalism almost as fast as they can think or type.

Blogs usually link to other online sites, so that readers can examine the writer’s sources first-hand -- or simply wallow in more like-minded thinking, as is often the case. One of the genre’s distinctive conventions is that the work goes directly from the writer’s computer to the Web without editorial counsel or intervention. Writers who err or repent of a rash opinion simply correct or confess in subsequent entries.

Since April, Weintraub -- a former Times staffer and one of California’s veteran political journalists -- has been producing a blog called “California Insider” for the Bee’s online edition (www.sacbee.com). Its mixture of cutting-edge reportage, shrewd analysis and blunt opinion -- all of it posted as events break, sometimes virtually live from significant campaign events -- has made Weintraub the go-to-guy among this campaign’s journalists.

“I think that he has emerged as the recall press corps’ star not because of his opinions but because he’s ahead of everybody with the important news,” said former Times political writer and columnist Bill Boyarsky, who now lectures at USC’s Annenberg School of Communications. “Unlike the other bloggers covering this campaign, he really knows state government and politics. He makes judgments, but they’re judgments to which he’s entitled because of his experience and knowledge.”

So why the controversy?

Last weekend, the Sacramento Bee’s ombudsman, Tony Marcano, reported to his readers that “the Bee has instituted some reforms” in the way it handles California Insider. Rather than going directly onto the Web, “Weintraub’s blog now goes to the editorial page editor or his deputy before it’s posted” on the paper’s Web site. In other words, it now is an edited blog.

According to Marcano, the changes were made after the Legislature’s Latino Caucus sent a letter to the Bee’s publisher objecting to comments Weintraub posted during the dust-up over Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante’s refusal to disavow an offensive slogan widely used by MEChA, a Latino student organization to which he once belonged.

Weintraub wrote that Bustamante “certainly owed his elevation to the job of Assembly speaker to his ethnic background and to the support he received from fellow Latinos. If his name had been Charles Bustmont rather than Cruz Bustamante, he would have finished his legislative career as an anonymous back-bencher.” Weintraub, a critic of bilingual education, also wrote that “it’s indisputably true that the Legislature’s Latino Caucus advocates policies that are destructive to their own people and to greater California in the name of ethnic unity.”

The Bee’s ombudsman characterized that as “a contentious statement” and wrote that “no newspaper should publish an analysis without an editor’s review. That doesn’t mean that Weintraub’s blog should have been reworded, but an editor would at least have had the opportunity to question his conclusions.”

(Although there is no formal policy prohibiting blogs, The Times does not have any blogs on its Web site.)

Marcano’s revelation set off a cyberspatial firestorm. Bloggers -- led by Slate’s Mickey Kaus and Matt Welch, who also edits for the Libertarian magazine Reason -- expressed outrage that the Bee had caved in to a specialist interest and abridged one of their genre’s elemental freedom’s, unfettered access to the Web. L.A. Observed’s Kevin Roderick, whose site maintains a first-rate anthology of recall-related blogs -- asked: “Has Dan Weintraub been muzzled?”

Bloggers normally are a fractious lot, but by Monday a united “Free Weintraub” front had coalesced.

Matters were helped not a whit when the Bee’s executive editor, Rick Rodriguez, told Kaus that the paper actually had begun editing California Insider before receiving the Latino Caucus’ letter in response to objections by its own staff members to Weintraub’s postings about Bustamante and the Latino Caucus.

“Amazingly, this may be the Bee’s best defense,” Kaus wrote, “in effect, ‘We didn’t let the Latino Caucus muzzle Weintraub because we muzzled him first!” (Exclamation points signal irony on Kaus’ site.)

Sources at the Bee say that other internal reservations have been raised about Weintraub’s blog.

Some reporters and editors dislike the concept of linking to publications with which their paper competes.

Others object to the fact that Weintraub, who also writes a thrice-weekly column, routinely breaks news on the Web before it appears in the Bee’s print edition.

The blogging bloc’s alarms notwithstanding, a close reading of the California Insider does not support suspicions that Weintraub now labors under the iron heel of editorial oppression. He may be posting at a slightly slower rate. However, an item posted Monday and headed “Latino Caucus vs. Latino Kids” takes the group’s chairman, Assemblyman Marco Antonio Firebaugh, to task over a bilingual education bill in a way that suggests nobody has been muzzled.

What’s occurring in this campaign’s journalism and in this controversy is too novel, too fluid and, potentially, too consequential to admit firm conclusions. Questions and cautions seem more in order.

Fact: Weintraub’s unedited blog has provided this campaign with first-rate, timely journalism, a service to his readers and to the electorate at large.

Fact: Weintraub works for a newspaper and one of the things newspapers sell their readers is editing -- which is to say, not just information but judgment and context and, yes, even taste. Moreover, editing is not censorship; if it were, the commentary pages of newspapers across the country would not be filled with the range of vigorous arguments that appear every day.

Question: Isn’t it patronizing to suggest that a veteran journalist of Weintraub’s stature would allow himself to be muzzled or cowed into self-censorship by the prospect of answering an editor’s challenging queries?

Question: Perhaps blogs, which derive their immediacy and vibrancy from the Web’s essentially egalitarian and libertarian ethos, and conventional news organizations simply are incompatible in their pure forms?

“An edited blog is a contradiction in terms,” said Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. “It’s a characteristic of the Internet in general that forms like the blog emerge with great exuberance and edgy promise and then the overseers move in. That’s a pity. We need frontiers of plain-speaking, even it’s politically incorrect. I understand why the Bee did what it did, but it leads to a restraint on free-thinking, which is lamentable.”

There is much to be learned here. It’s a shame the Sacramento Bee’s editors did not allow this important experiment to reach its ultimate conclusion so that the rest of us could reach ours.