Nonbudsman

CBS News has hired Vaughn Ververs to serve as a "nonbudsman." He will write a blog for them and host a segment called I don't see how this can work over the long term. The network or its reporters are not required to talk to Ververs are not required to speak to him. Eventually, bridges will be burned and they won't talk to him. To make this work, he would have to have full access not only to reporters, but to their notes and sources as well, and that's definitely not going to happen in this day and age.

Actually, I'm not sure what he is going to do. In this Reuters article he has the following to say:

"I'm not here to set the rules," Ververs said. "I'm not even here to voice my opinion. That's not my job."

Isn't voicing your opinion what a blogger does. Ververs goes on to say:

"It's going to be an honest, fair, unvarnished look at what we do, and that means that it's an experiment," Heyward said. "It's a risk. Not everybody approves of what we do. But I'm banking on the fact that people will also see how much effort we make about being fair and being ethical."

I don't know how one man can begin to do this job by himself. Ververs must be planning to sit around running quite a few Technorati searches. You see, the reason bloggers are able to point out the inaccuracies in major media stories is the shear number of us dwarfs the number of them.