Another thing that was covered last night (again, chiefly by Matt and Ross), was the history of political blogging. Ross pointed out out that when blogging really got started around 1999-2001, it was mostly reactionary in nature in that it was right-wingers reacting to what they considered to be a dominant liberal media. The irony of that was that this coincided with a time period in which the Bush administration was receiving extremely favorable press, and liberals quickly reacted.
Another thing that was noted was that liberals were much quicker to embrace blogs as a tool of political organization, and the Daily Kos was mentioned. Ross seemed to be upset that conservatives still had not caught up to liberals in this regard.
One of the overall recurring themes, although it was never stated outright, was the reactive nature of blogs. Mainly, this was touched in the question/argument over whether blogs will replace the traditional MSM, and the prevailing opinion was that no, they would not. More than likely, they would consume each other, as we are seeing now. As an anecdote, Ross mentioned what the Atlantic crew was doing. Essentially, they built their blog operation around Sullivan and his traffic, and the idea was that the best supplement to the long-form writing at the Atlantic was blogs.
This is a recurring theme that seems to play out in almost every discussion of blogging. While there is, no doubt, a great deal of original reporting on blogs, much of what blogs do is simply react to what is reported in traditional media. I don’t suspect that will change much, and we see it every day. If you go to memeorandum, most of what you see is people reacting to the news of the day. there is a great deal of pushback, there are attempts to correct the narrative of the day, and there are attempts to push the stories that bloggers agree with throughout the news cycle.
At any rate, I will try to get a link up to a digital version of the presentation as soon as there is one available. From my perspective, it really was the Ross and Matt show, as they addressed the issues I found interesting. Terence really seemed out of place, as he was more of a traditional reporter who recently made the leap to theRoot.com, Phillip was more of a professional campaign worker, and Abbi basically discussed how she covered blogging on the news, which seemed sort of meta to me.
Incertus
If there’s anything that will kill the idea that the blogging world will somehow make the press irrelevant, it’s the never-ending stream of granite-countertop-esque stories that the right wing dumps out there. Lefties try it–spend a couple of hours in the diary section of Kos some day and you’ll see plenty of “citizen journalism” there as well–but on the whole, I think the left figured out pretty early that they might be able to shed light on bullshit memes, but that they were basically going to be media critics, not the media itself.
cleek
political blogging is simply an interactive, fast-twitch, editorial page. you can get the same quality of punditry from dozens of bloggers that you get from any of the print columnists, and you get new pieces several times a week, if not several times an hour – and more importantly, you can talk back.
one of the best things is that political blogging reduces the stature of established print columnists. instead of voices from On High, they’re now just like any of a hundred well-written on-line pundits, but with anachronistically-high salaries (for what they do) and oversized hit counts.
John Cole
I was actually going to ask the panel about that, but I decided it was too inside baseball for much of the crowd. Plus, there were so many students that wanted to ask questions that I just stayed out of the way. Much more important that they take advantage of the opportunity than me, as this festival of Ideas series really is for them.
John Cole
I like the speed of it, as it really caters to people like me. I am a heater- I react quickly. That can be problematic, as all hot mediums can be, and I can often say things that come back and haunt me.
BillB
Maybe so, but I look at a site like TPM which has been building a pretty substantial reporting operation, and has broken several important stories in the past year (for instance, the USAG firing scandal). Or look at Firedoglake liveblogging the Libby trial.
Why can’t the blogs be both reactive and generative? I think it’s a mistake to shoehorn the blogosphere into one specific role. The thing I like best about it is that it can be many things.
Wilfred
Seems that there is also more and more reaction to other blogs, certainly around here. But are we anywhere near the possibility of the public sphere? Is that a discussion topic? Seems to be precious little consensus forming and more and more massification of group/idea sub-sets.
zzyzx
Exactly. At least bloggers understand the blogging world where everything and anything will be challenged with primary sources by people who don’t have nearly enough to do at their jobs.
The one downside I can see to all of this is that it does make the world a little more boring if politicians can’t tell a tall tale or two without having to worry about the fact checking army. There can be such a thing as too much information.
ithaqua
“you can get the same quality of punditry from dozens of bloggers that you get from any of the print columnists”
As a former subscriber to the Wall Street Journal, I can tell you that you’re damming with very faint praise :P
“But are we anywhere near the possibility of the public sphere? Is that a discussion topic? Seems to be precious little consensus forming and more and more massification of group/idea sub-sets.”
Well, that’s how the public sphere works too – one side listens to Fox and Limbaugh, the other side listens to NPR and Air America, and the mushy middle listens to CNN/NBC/whatever and doesn’t pay much attention. It’s easy to filter out unwanted viewpoints and withdraw into your own little insulated news bubble, but the alternative – the pre-cable, Fairness Doctrine world where there were only a handful of news sources, all forced into banal neutrality, and it was that viewpoint or nothing – is even worse, IMHO…
Did I have a point here? Oh, yeah… no, wait, it’s gone. Sorry :P
ithaqua
“Mainly, this was touched in the question/argument over whether blogs will replace the traditional MSM, and the prevailing opinion was that no, they would not. More than likely, they would consume each other, as we are seeing now.”
I agree that blogs won’t replace the MSM – supplement it, yes, but the vast majority of bloggers don’t have the time or the resources or the access to public figures (TPM is an exception) to do the sort of investigative journalism that the MSM at its best can manage. Different roles.
That being said, I also don’t think blogs will ‘consume each other’. Bloggers like audiences, and so are drawn to contribute at group blogs and blog collectives like the Daily Kos or Scienceblogs.com, so there’s a certain amount of self-reinforcing centralization as audience attracts bloggers attract audience and so on.
At the same time, though, there’s a constant influx of new bloggers and new voices into the blogging scene; moreover, since bloggers by nature are independent and like to argue, Internet Drama is a constant risk in any group blog and contributors, for many reasons, often head out on their own – ie, Daily Kos, which has spawned literally thousands of smaller blogs in its career.
Zifnab
Haha. Um… no. Imagine if Reagen had gone on his “welfare queen” schtick and been shot down by the afternoon by a host of angry fact checkers. Or if Dukakhis had dropped a line on DKos polling people on what they would think of him riding around in a tank. The world might have been a better place.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
John,
I can only speak from personal experience here (Doh!), but one way in which blogs have replaced the MSM por moi is as information aggregators. Reading a fair diversity of blogs and following the links posted by hosts and commentators exposes me to stories from a much greater variety of MSM publications, many of them from outside the US, than would otherwise be the case.
In that sense blogs, google news and other portal and news aggregator websites have already replaced the TV and the local fishwrap newspaper, and to me it feels like the overall quality of the journalism is substantially better, simply because the self-censored quality of US based publications is less of a factor. Thank god for the foreign English-language press is all I can say, because most of the political MSM we have here in this country are just at a trainwreck level of godawful.
attaturk
Well, finally
A MORAN gets a life! ;-)
zzyzx
“It’s easy to filter out unwanted viewpoints and withdraw into your own little insulated news bubble, but the alternative – the pre-cable, Fairness Doctrine world where there were only a handful of news sources, all forced into banal neutrality, and it was that viewpoint or nothing – is even worse, IMHO…”
I’m not 100% convinced. How does a democracy function when people whose beliefs are shared by 1% of the population think that they’re a super majority because everyone they talk to agrees with them? It’s getting harder to form consensuses. That worries me.
Cris
I’m not convinced that the “pre-cable, Fairness Doctrine world” (as ithaqua called it) made it any easier to form consensuses. Again, it’s just as easy to self-select the range of opinions you are exposed to with traditional media. A person who is only going to read blogs that agree with his worldview would probably have only read magazines that agreed with his worldview.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the reactive nature of political blogging makes me more likely to be exposed to alternative viewpoints. For example, I would have no idea who Michelle Malkin was if Oliver Willis hadn’t harped on her so much. He might link to her with scorn, but he still links to her — so now I know something about what she has to say. And I can easily read her own words, whereas if I read a print criticism, I’d have to go seek out another publication to get the full context.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I don’t think this question (do 21st Cen. media prevent consensus opinion from congealing or assist it) is deterministic, what result we get really will depend a great deal on how people react to these changes and what sort of skills they deploy to deal with them.
It seems to me that in the internet era epistemological skills have become more important than ever as our access to raw data increases, and the schools need to be teaching kids how to understand sources, evaluate data, look for biases, etc. even more now than in the past.
Mark Gisleson
Not just reaction, but aggregation as well. News consumers who have actual lives (something few bloggers seem to be burdened by) are coming to rely on their favorite bloggers to not just explain the news to them, but to find, sort and present the news.
Newspapers have, in general, turned into corporatized POS. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t some important news stories in the Times and Post today. Until I shut down my blog about a month ago, I had about 500 daily readers who relied on me to let them know which stories in that day’s NYTimes, WaPost, Star Tribune, Chicago Tribune, LA Times, etc., was worth their time.
They also relied on me to let them know when these newspapers were full of it, and giving bad information on key events.
That is the importance of blogs: to serve as a gatekeeper for regular people who can’t begin to spend the time necessary to sort through a hundred or more news sources a day to determine what the news of the day really means.
Wilfred
Good point. Critical thinking on the part of bloggers is almost non-existent so information is just transmitted or exchanged. I’ve been playing with a ‘poetics’ of political blogging which runs: an assertion is made, its transmission turns it into something to be discussed, the discussion becomes the vehicle for transmitting further assertions’. The original assertion takes its place in the category ‘discussed item’, where it’s relative truth, importance, meaning is secondary to its status as a thing discussed.
This is yet another base-superstructure problem – this time the mass production of discussion without originality.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Mark,
That is my info-lifestyle. I lean on blogs to expand the range of journalistic sources I can graze while still providing some organizational structure to use in consuming what is out there, otherwise it would make for a big chaotic glob which would just be undigestable.
The old NYT masthead “All the news that’s fit to print” both revealed and concealed an important role that the newspaper management was filling, which was to organize and prioritize an otherwise unmanageable mess of data, and to the extent that they succeeded they were adding value for their readers. The problem is that this is a source of great power and hence subject to capture and abuse.
Blogs don’t change this at all, but they are providing the benefit of shaking up the pre-existing heirarchy of entrenched news aggregators, many of whom have been hopelessly corrupted and no longer provide value (except to those who have captured them).
Just Some Fuckhead
There were a few anti-Bush sites around in 1999-2000. I vaguely remember one I used to read written by a guy in Texas. I think it was called BushAwol or AwolBush. Anyway, this guy focused exclusively on the trainwreck that was Bush.
Of course, the Selection of 2000 really kicked liberal blogging into highgear but the Deaniacs all think it started with them several years later.
jake
Hey John, did the Alterman piece in The New Yorker come up?
Probably a good thing it wasn’t the Terrence & Phillip show.
skippy
lol! you stole my joke!