The blogs of war
TheStar.com - The blogs of war
With more than 2 million in the U.S. alone, Weblogs have clearly come of age
These Internet diaries have left their mark on this year's key presidential election
DAVID OLIVE
Have political "bloggers," writers of Internet diaries known as Weblogs, or "blogs" for short, exerted an unprecedented influence in this year's U.S. election season?
Yes, undeniably, even if bloggers and their traditional adversaries in the so-called Big Media establishment both tend to exaggerate that influence.
It doesn't get more influential than the New York Times' decision Oct. 24, as the curtain rose on the final week of the presidential campaign, to move ahead by one week the publication of its exclusive on missing munitions in Iraq, reported jointly with CBS's "60 Minutes."
Explosive in every sense of the word, the story dominated a week in which the Bush-Cheney camp had expected to continue exploiting its advantage over Kerry-Edwards on the issue of national security — and instead was obliged to play defence as John Kerry hammered the administration for what the Democrat described as another example of "incredible incompetence" in Iraq.
Had the story broken as originally planned — yesterday, in tandem with a matching "60 Minutes" segment Sunday night — Kerry would have had just two days rather than eight to exploit the sensational disclosure that 377 tons of Saddam's munitions may well have been looted under the unwatchful eye of the U.S.-led occupation forces.
And the story broke in last Monday's Times rather than yesterday because, as Times executive editor Bill Keller regretfully informed his CBS counterpart, the scoop was already making the rounds of the Internet. Indeed, bleary-eyed visitors to Daily Kos, a liberal Web site whose 350,000 readers would rank the site among America's top 20 newspapers, were treated to an accurate synopsis of the blockbuster story hours before Times readers perused the front-page piece over breakfast.
Political bloggers are on a high. Their credibility once questioned by traditional journalists, they now find an audience among an estimated 20 per cent of newspaper readers, who appreciate the bloggers' self-styled role in correcting the factual errors and biases of the mass-market print and broadcast news media.
Bloggers credit themselves with fueling the Howard Dean insurgency that so shocked the Democratic establishment; and for the first time this year, were accredited at both the Democratic and Republican national conventions. They were prominent in the "Rathergate" scandal, discrediting the "evidence" of George W. Bush's spotty Air National Guard attendance record which CBS ultimately confessed it could not verify.
They debunked reports that Republicans at a Bush rally had booed the president's good wishes to recovering heart-surgery patient Bill Clinton, disseminating audio and video tapes showing no such bad taste. And last week, Daily Kos' examination of a Bush-Cheney ad determined that it used doctored footage, forcing Team Bush not only to yank the ad but to spend precious time on damage control.
Bloggers revel in holding pols' and their media peers' feet to the fire, and were delighted last week to hear Newsweek chief political correspondent Howard Fineman acknowledge that the bloggers' criticism was often "hurtful," and Tom Brokaw's assessment that the "Rathergate" piling on amounted to a "political jihad."
Glenn Reynolds, whose conservative Instapundit blog qualifies as a grand-daddy of the phenomenon, dating from the late 1990s, is chuffed by the Big Media backlash.
"Many journalists were unhappy with the fact-checking — as, I imagine, the armoured knights of the Middle Ages were unhappy to encounter longbows, crossbows, and pikes — technological innovations that meant their dominance of the battlefield was at an end."
Reynolds, not alone in his blogger exuberance, is jumping the gun, however. Political bloggers make their own mistakes, as when ABC's influential The Note conflated some minor personnel changes in the Kerry-Edwards camp into a full-blown and desperate overhaul.
More to the point, though, political bloggers face severe limitations. Like most of the estimated two million blogs operated by Americans — most dealing with advances in model railroading, fishing lures and software breakthroughs — even the most prominent political bloggers tend to be one-person operations.
With a staff of perhaps a dozen "Googling monkeys" who scan 50 newspapers and dozens of political talk-show transcripts and obscure government documents, even The Note is vastly out-gunned by the newsroom of a metropolitan daily like the Star, with its 400-plus journalists, and the New York Times, which boasts more than 1,200 reporters and editors.
Original reporting remains the domain of Big Media, which fields the correspondents whose work becomes the fodder of the bloggers. Even the most credentialed of the bloggers — law professor Reynolds; PhD candidate Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette; and polished magazine journalist Joshua Micah Marshall, an editor at the liberal American Prospect after completing his PhD in American history at Brown University — expend most of their energy riffing off mainstream media reports and obscure government documents, think-tank papers and academic treatises rather than wearing out shoe leather.
The continued humility of their station tempts many to seek celebrity as collaborators with the Big Media they so often castigate — as with Wonkette's unsuccessful stint as an MTV commentator at the Democratic National Convention, or Marshall's similarly unhappy flirtation with a TV network on a documentary that was never broadcast.
More bluntly, traditional political advertising and opinion polls still exert far more influence in shaping the political landscape than bloggers. If Kerry loses Nov. 2, he will have suffered from his month-long hiatus last summer while the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth engaged in their mission of character assassination — which continues, despite the diligence of many bloggers in exposing the Swifties' distortions.
And it's the campaigns' internal polling — not the urgent advice proffered to each campaign by partisan bloggers — that found Dick Cheney, Al Gore and Alexandra Kerry winging to Hawaii late last week to secure four possibly critical Electoral College votes; just as it was Bush-Cheney's aggressive campaigning in once-safe Michigan which, by the Dems' own admission, has forced Kerry-Edwards to expend more energy in the Great Lake State than they'd prefer in the campaign's final days.
Bloggers do help keep stories alive, as with Marshall's persistent examination of the phantom WMD fiasco. But U.S. public opinion hasn't been overly swayed by the bloggers' polemics, any more than the Paul Martin camp heeded must-read Liberal insider Warren Kinsella's prescient enumeration of its strategic failings on his blog during last summer's Canadian election.
At most — so far, at least — blogs still function chiefly as a grapevine. A compelling study of rising abortion rates by a noted U.S. pro-choice theologian was picked up by pioneering conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan on Oct. 21, by the Star's Pulse U.S. election blog six days later via Sullivan, and made its mainstream debut last Sunday in the op-ed column of the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof.
And while the blogosphere was once an echo chamber — lonely diarists with too much time on their hands writing for each others' entertainment — it now usefully signals shifts in public opinion. The preoccupation of several blogs with Trent Lott's apparent endorsement of Strom Thurmond's segregationalist legacy garnered sufficient mainstream media attention to force Lott to quit his leadership post in the U.S. Senate.
And the Star's Pulse daily blog during the Canadian election — a first for a Canadian newspaper — succeeded not in guiding voter sentiment but only in reflecting it. Halfway through the campaign, Pulse reader response abruptly shifted from a welcome embrace of Stephen Harper's refreshing, unorthodox ideas to a near-revulsion for the Tories' apparent intolerance on a range of socially-progressive issues. But did that shift affect the strategy of Team Harper? Decidedly not.
More disturbing is the trivialization of blogger content as this niche media expands in popularity. From a standing start last year, Wonkette in three months built an audience to rival that which Marshall had earned in three years. How? "She swims in the libidinal current of American politics" — a Village Voice "endorsement" that Cox proudly displays on her site. Anything but a policy wonk, Cox showcases ephemera like Georgetown guest lists, speculates on political sex lives and draws out attention to a Lynndie England-inspired Hallowe'en get-up — a 5-year-old girl equipped with, what else, a dog leash.
Wonkette, as must-read as ABC's The Note, whose inside dope is accessed daily by the likes of Karl Rove, James Carville and every network news producer, is hugely entertaining if not the exercise in revolutionary civics edification and the overthrow of Big Media that Reynolds still heralds.
So it goes with transformational inventions. Possibly Gutenberg wasn't inspired to ultimately spur the dissemination of supermarket tabloids. And the pioneer bloggers would not have imagined the less than Jeffersonian mandate that Nick Denton, the entrepreneur who recruited Cox for his stable of Gawker Media blogs, had in mind for her.
"The only thing he said," Cox told the New York Times in September, "was that he wanted [Wonkette] to be funnier than Josh Marshall. The bar isn't raised too high." Yeow.
Any wonder that bloggers still haven't put the issue of their credibility entirely behind them?
Or, as survey respondent Bill Gillam of Arlington, Wash., told an Associated Press-sponsored report on blog readership, "I find them to be akin to listening to the guy in front of you talking to his buddy when you are at Starbucks."
David Olive edited the Star's Canadian and U.S. election blogs.
November 1, 2004 at 07:55 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink
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