Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

I'm gonna try in 10 minutes to answer whether this is new wine in new bottles or old wine in new bottles. I want your attention now: stop multitasking. Part of the problem is that we're giving something up when we don't give our full attention to something.

It's not entirely new wine. There's an awful lot that's good about old media. With Huffpost, our goal is to preserve what's best - thoroughness, fact checking, ferreting out the truth. You can never give that up, even for partisanship. But old media has given up the truth for a fake neutrality, like there are two equal sides for every issue. Take global warming, for example. The truth is, it's not always found by splitting the difference. There earth is not flat, evolution is a fact - sorry, Mike Huckabee. Iraq gets presented as a "mixed bag." It's like going to the doctor and they say, your brain tumor is still there, but your acne has cleared. It's the illusion of neutrality, rather than actually ferreting out the truth.

The new media is bringing transparency, accountability and community to news. Transparency means that everyone knew Mayhill Fowler was an Obama supporter when she covered the campaign. It's better than beltway reporters who play tennis with politicos then pretend to have to personal relationship with them.

Lou Dobbs is supposed to be a journalist? He said leprosy had increased over 3 years because of illegal immigrants. But it was really over 30 years. The NY Times exposed it, but there was no accountability.

It's not enough to break a story and cover it once. We need the obsessive compulsiveness of new media, not the ADD of old media.

When it comes to community, it's one of the greatest gifts of new media. We've devoted a lot of resources at huffpost to promote a civil conversation. Behind anonymity, people post vile comments. But we need better tools to ensure it stays civil.

If you want an example of what can go wrong, it has to do with human nature. The more access bloggers are given, the more we're gonna find ourselves tempted by that access. We may sell our objectivity to gain an all access pass to the new White House. Look at Bob Woodward. He started as a great journalist that brought down a prez but became one that helped enable another prez to sell the war. He wrote two books and missed the story. My chapter on him in my new book is called The Dumb Blonde of American Journalism. Bob Woodward said that Bush had changed, but he never actually did.

If you want to honor these things, you can never sell our independence for access.