Blog bravery

David SHAW must feel threatened by the remarkable rise of the blogger [“Do Bloggers Deserve Basic Journalistic Protections?,” March 27]. Part of his concern is that because blogger articles do not get filtered by four different editors, they don’t offer reliable or objective news.

The one and only time I have put down money to buy a copy of the L.A. Times was a few weeks ago when blogger John Aravosis (of AMERICAblog.com) wrote about prostitute and phony White House journalist “Jeff Gannon,” a solid story with huge implications. The mainstream media cowardly sat on the sidelines and pocket-vetoed the story.

The blogosphere is still in its “Wild West” stage of development, but isn’t it amazing that it took bloggers with “no journalistic experience” to expose a gay prostitute in the White House, with no journalistic experience, disseminating government propaganda? Stop whining about bloggers. Stop focusing on ratings and deadlines. Start doing relevant investigative journalism and watch your sales soar. Until then, I won’t buy newspapers from cowards.

Fred Maske

Glendale

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It bears remembering that Mike Barnicle, Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass and Jack Kelley, to name a few disgraced traditional journalists, all had the trappings of “institutional safeguards”: editors, publishers and hundreds of co-workers.

The blogosphere is open to anyone who has a newsworthy story to tell. And isn’t that, after all, the definition of a journalist? Though some newsmakers and old-media gatekeepers may want to draw a distinction between bloggers and institutional journalists, the 1st Amendment does not.

Faye M. Anderson

Brooklyn, N.Y.