You might think that, I couldn’t possibly blog it.

House of Cards’ Slugline: The future of TV weighs in on the future of news.

(Season 1 spoilers.)

Everyone’s talking about the new season of House of Cards, which went live on Netflix on 2/14. As a journalism and politics college student, some of the most interesting scenes of the first season featured the hotshot internet news startup Slugline.

Zoe Barnes leaves a low-level job at the stuffy, old-school Washington Herald to work at the online Politico clone, excited at the prospect of working with journalists who understand how important it is to have an online presence, and who’ll give her the space and responsibility to report on the real issues.

As a freshman who has yet to take any journalism classes, I don’t feel I have much authority to talk about how credible a news source the fictional Slugline is. Mostly, I’m basing these opinions on how Slugline’s talked about in the show. To a large extent, how the site’s talked about by other characters says more about its modus operandi and its place in the world.

It can be frustrating at times. He makes you double and triple check things and you want to get the news out the moment you have it. And he makes you rewrite until it’s perfect. — Zoe Barnes speaking about the Herald.

So unreasonable, right? Right off the bat, this raises my amateur journalist heckles. News is all about facts, so they should be double- and triple-checked. Journalistic writing should be rewritten until it’s as close to ‘perfect’ as possible. Is Zoe suggesting that these are ideals journalists shouldn’t strive towards? Is any serious journalist going to side with her and say that we should do away with the editing process?

Speaking to the newspaper’s owner, the managing editor of the Herald lashes out at Zoe Barnes and citizen journalism. Ostensibly, he’s the bad guy in this subplot — the grinch who makes unreasonable demands on his journalists. He says:

Zoe Barnes, Twitter, blogs, enriched media — they’re all surface, they’re fads. They aren’t the foundation this paper was built on and they aren’t what will keep it alive. We have a core readership that thirsts for hard news. Those are the people I work 80 hours a week for. And I won’t be distracted by what’s fashionable.

Isn’t unbiased reporting a pillar of journalistic integrity? Isn’t hard news always the basis of journalism? Don’t we all deride the likes of Buzzfeed for articles like The 21 Most Awkward Situations In History?

House of Cards creates a false dichotomy: while blogs and enriched media do encourage and facilitate journalists and writers playing fast and loose with the facts, it’s not the only alternative to traditional print journalism. Online journalism might lend itself to the most dramatic angle rather than the most newsworthy angle, but there is no shortage of hard news online. Again, I’m speaking without much experience, but I don’t believe mainstream news is going anywhere fast.

It’s also worth noting that online news has a lot of advantages print journalism doesn’t enjoy. As my brother Patrick wrote, individuals can now cast a spotlight on government action, and local aberrations stick out more.

This is why the comments of the Slugline founder are so jarring to me:

You don’t have to send me things before you post. The goal here is for everyone to post things faster than I have a chance to read ‘em. If you’re satisfied with the article, just put it up. […] Whatever hoops the Herald made you jump through, let them go.

‘Hoops’? To me, Slugline’s role in House of Cards is to be the antithesis to old news outlets, the boring behemoths who are being dragged, hollering and crying, into the 21st century. At Slugline, they’re conflating news with opinion, which seems fine and dandy to me so long as they’re marked as op-eds. Slugline is too vague an institution to draw the distinction.

I’m apparently not alone in thinking this — TVWorthWatching.com:

But the message is clear: the next phase of the free press — the fourth estate and essential guardian of democracy — will no longer be troubled with the standards that left Op/Ed partitioned from the news for a couple of centuries. Or, it seems, office furniture.