Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]
Welcome to Campfire Soapbox. We hope you enjoy your visit.


You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free.


Join our community!


If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features:

Username:   Password:
Add Reply
The Blogs Must Be Crazy
Topic Started: Feb 18 2005, 02:41 PM (157 Views)
cmoehle
Member Avatar
Chris - San Antonio TX
No comment. But Noonan is a delight to read. And blogs are related to forums...aren't they?

The Blogs Must Be Crazy

Or maybe the MSM is just suffering from freedom envy.

Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

"Salivating morons." "Scalp hunters." "Moon howlers." "Trophy hunters." "Sons of Sen. McCarthy." "Rabid." "Blogswarm." "These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people."

This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers!

Those MSMers have gone wild, I tell you! The tendentious language, the low insults. It's the Wild Wild West out there. We may have to consider legislation.

When you hear name-calling like what we've been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don't have a serious case of freedom envy.

The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn't. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

But MSM criticism of the blogosphere misses the point, or rather points.

Blogging changes how business is done in American journalism. The MSM isn't over. It just can no longer pose as if it is The Guardian of Established Truth. The MSM is just another player now. A big one, but a player.

The blogosphere isn't some mindless eruption of wild opinion. That isn't their power. This is their power:

1. They use the tools of journalists (computer, keyboard, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to ask the question) and of the Internet (Google, LexisNexis) to look for and find facts that have been overlooked, ignored or hidden. They look for the telling quote, the ignored statistic, the data that have been submerged. What they are looking for is information that is true. When they get it they post it and include it in the debate. This is a public service.

2. Bloggers, unlike reporters at elite newspapers and magazines, are independent operators. They are not, and do not have to be, governed by mainstream thinking. Nor do they have to accept the directives of an editor pushing an ideology or a publisher protecting his friends. Bloggers have the freedom to decide on their own when a story stops being a story. They get to decide when the search for facts is over. They also decide on their own when the search for facts begins. It was a blogger at the World Economic Forum, as we all know, who first reported the Eason Jordan story. It was bloggers, as we all know, who pursued it. Matt Drudge runs a news site and is not a blogger, but what was true of him at his beginning (the Monica Lewinsky story, he decided, is a story) is true of bloggers: It's a story if they say it is. This is a public service.

3. Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: "Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report." In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that's new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That's not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn't carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago. In the old days a lot of interesting information fell off the editing desk in this way. Now it doesn't. This is a public service.

4. Bloggers are also selling the smartest take on a story. They're selling an original insight, a new area of inquiry. Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles has his bright take, Andrew Sullivan had his, InstaPundit has his. They're all selling their shrewdness, experience, depth. This too is a public service.

5. And they're doing it free. That is, the Times costs me a dollar and so does the Journal, but Kausfiles doesn't cost a dime. This too is a public service. Some blogs get their money from yearly fund-raising, some from advertisers, some from a combination, some from a salary provided by Slate or National Review. Most are labors of love. Some bloggers--a lot, I think--are addicted to digging, posting, coming up with the bright phrase. OK with me. Some get burned out. But new ones are always coming up, so many that I can't keep track of them and neither can anyone else.

But when I read blogs, when I wake up in the morning and go to About Last Night and Lucianne and Lileks, I remember what the late great Christopher Reeve said on "The Tonight Show" 20 years ago. He was the second guest, after Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield did his act and he was hot as a pistol. Then after Reeve sat down Dangerfield continued to be riotous. Reeve looked at him, gestured toward him, looked at the audience and said with grace and delight, "Do you believe this is free?" The audience cheered. That's how I feel on their best days when I read blogs.

That you get it free doesn't mean commerce isn't involved, for it is. It is intellectual commerce. Bloggers give you information and point of view. In return you give them your attention and intellectual energy. They gain influence by drawing your eyes; you gain information by lending your eyes. They become well-known and influential; you become entertained or informed. They get something from it and so do you.

6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web.

There are blogs that carry political and ideological agendas. But everyone is on to them and it's mostly not obnoxious because their agendas are mostly declared.

7. I don't know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pierson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and '40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don't know how Walter Lippman or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they'd lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them--but, well, too bad. I've been attacked. Too bad. If you can't take it, you shouldn't be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.

I conclude with a few predictions.

Some brilliant rising young reporter with a growing reputation at the Times or Newsweek or Post is going to quit, go into the blogging business, start The Daily Joe, get someone to give him a guaranteed ad for two years, and become a journalistic force. His motive will be influence, and the use of his gifts along the lines of excellence. His blog will further legitimize blogging.

Most of the blogstorms of the past few years have resulted in outcomes that left and right admit or bray were legitimate. Dan Rather fell because his big story was based on a fabrication, Trent Lott said things that it could be proved he said. But coming down the pike is a blogstorm in which the bloggers turn out to be wrong. Good news: They'll probably be caught and exposed by bloggers. Bad news: It will show that blogging isn't nirvana, and its stars aren't foolproof. But then we already know that, don't we?

Some publisher is going to decide that if you can't fight blogs, you can join them. He'll think like this: We're already on the Internet. That's how bloggers get and review our reporting. Why don't we get our own bloggers to challenge our work? Why don't we invite bloggers who already exist into the tent? Why not take the best things said on blogs each day and print them on a Daily Blog page? We'd be enhancing our rep as an honest news organization, and it will further our branding!

Someone is going to address the "bloggers are untrained journalists" question by looking at exactly what "training," what education in the art/science/craft/profression of journalism, the reporters and editors of the MSM have had in the past 60 years or so. It has seemed to me the best of them never went to J-school but bumped into journalism along the way--walked into a radio station or newspaper one day and found their calling. Bloggers signify a welcome return to that old style. In journalism you learn by doing, which is what a lot of bloggers are doing.

Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of the country are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they're going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it's there, most heartening information from . . . some lone blogger out there. And then another. They're going to do some big work down the road.
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.
--Barry Goldwater
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
DanHouck
Member Avatar
Land of Enchantment NM
Yes, we are bloggers with nicer graphics IMO (I mean this board would put most of them to shame!). This is a great read, I really feel part of the blogger family and enjoyed the invectives hurled at us greatly. Have a nice Friday Chris, it's gin and tonic and junk food carryout night here! :)

Dan
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
sylley2000
Member Avatar
Sylvia, Grand Bend ON
The Bloggers tell it as they see it which is something the media increasingly do not. The biggest difference is that most of them are just ordinary people who are not paid by anyone to search for news.

There are left-wing, right-wing and centrist bloggers -- it's refreshing to hear news that comes from the heart. Are they more truthful...that is the question?

Sylvia
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
cmoehle
Member Avatar
Chris - San Antonio TX
Enjoy, Dan, I've got the flu or I'd be at a Rally swigging beer.



Sylvia, I don't buy that telling it as I see it from the heart is more truthful. More honest, yes, but not more truthful. Truth, if found, is in the mix, not the parts...sort of like a good gin and tonic and ice and lime or however you mix one, or the water, malt, hops, and yeast of a good beer.
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.
--Barry Goldwater
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
CalRed
Member Avatar
Member
The amazing thing to me is the effect Bloggers have on everything national now. They had a considerable effect on how the candidates ran their campaigns.
Something instead of Nothing?

"I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle.
God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing."
Alan Sandage

Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
sylley2000
Member Avatar
Sylvia, Grand Bend ON
At least you know what their bias is coming from when you read news from blogs. Then it's relatively easy to filter it out by comparing it to what is on other blogs. We all have bias--that is the nature of being human and coming from different backgrounds cherishing unique ideals.

It's very hard to find balance with the majors because they are paid and are influenced by their advertisers, politicians and their owners.

I like to 'think' I know mine, but that is subject to the eye of the beholder too.

Sylvia

On edit: What is truth? It too is subject to what is acceptable to the mind of the reader. Only mathematics and the 'hard' subjects are easily verifiable.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
cmoehle
Member Avatar
Chris - San Antonio TX
Well, that's true. But you can see the bias in the established media as well, like CNN and FOX.


Cal, that's exactly true. It's great to see that power in the hands of the people, but sometimes I worry we may be becoming overdemocratized.
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.
--Barry Goldwater
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
sylley2000
Member Avatar
Sylvia, Grand Bend ON
Millions of readers don't!

Sylvia
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
cmoehle
Member Avatar
Chris - San Antonio TX
Of course not, they feel they have new found power. But remember what Noonan said Christopher Reeve said about "Do you believe this is free?" That power is diluted for the individual as special interest groups concentrate money and overpower the individual voter with exposure, you end up with chaotic horse race primaries where possibly the worst pol wins--Kerry; you end up with the muckraking and mudslinging of moveon.orgs and swift boat groups; you end of with popularity contests between mass-marketed populist politicians appealing to the masses out both sides their mouths; you end up not talking issues in any intellectually honest, substantial or principled way. If you want that, welcome to it, I don't.
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.
--Barry Goldwater
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
sylley2000
Member Avatar
Sylvia, Grand Bend ON
Quote:
 
you end up with the muckraking and mudslinging of moveon.orgs and swift boat groups; you end of with popularity contests between mass-marketed populist politicians appealing to the masses out both sides their mouths; you end up not talking issues in any intellectually honest, substantial or principled way. If you want that, welcome to it, I don't.


That is not what I'm seeing. It's more like a ground swell of people seeking information that is based on truth. Blogs are self-correcting as Noonan pointed out, in that articles that are presented that don't meet the standard of accuracy are soon detected by other bloggers. If a blogger doesn't post information that is reliable, he is soon ignored.

The moveon.orgs and swift boat groups are soon discovered as being partisan and not given the time of day.

The Internet so far is providing the best iformation that is out there. And I expect that phenemona to grow rather than diminish. It's an opportunity to compare and contrast information such as the world has never seen before.

Sylvia
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
Fr. Mike
Member
I personally have received more news information and from a wider audience than would ever be possible by simply relying on main line news organizations.

And I believe the polling features on the blogs are far more accurate than the mainline polling sources.

It was blogs that aimed the spotlight on CBS and Dan Rather.

I would imagine the political parties are trying to figure a way to counteract the affect blogs are having in political races.

With blogs, one can communicate with the "we the people" all over the world.

One year ago--I knew virtually nothing of what was out there in the mainstream. Thanks to these forums for bringing me up to speed.

Fr. Mike
A humble servant of the Lord Jesus Christ

Don't forget to say your prayers!
The unborn have rights too.
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
cmoehle
Member Avatar
Chris - San Antonio TX
I don't doubt the potential for good, but am leary of the equal potential for evil. The Internet provides a new way of communication--not one-on-one, not one-to-many (speeches), not many-to-one (voting), but many-to-many. Whether what bubbles to the top and floats is truth or crap will depend on whether it is truely peoples' voices being heard or monied special interests. If the former it can truly affect other forms of communication; if the latter, just more of the same old crapola.



Hi, Mike, good to see you, been meaning to stop by the 'hood, and will.
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.
--Barry Goldwater
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
« Previous Topic · Soapbox · Next Topic »
Add Reply