Picking Up the Flag\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As the newspapers and newsmagazines shrink physically and cover less, they and the broadcast and cable news have also been doing it worse.\u00a0 One media critic who\u2019s been sounding the alarm particularly sharply is Eric Boehlert.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u2019ve had occasion in these pages <\/a>to cite his book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush<\/em> (2006)<\/a>, a detailed scolding of the mainstream media for consistently failing to challenge either disinformation from the conservative propaganda machine or the lies the White House used to sell the Iraq conflict to the American people.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It turns out, though, that someone has<\/em> been doing journalism right.\u00a0 That would be the netroots bloggers, heroes of Boehlert\u2019s new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press<\/em> (2009).\u00a0 <\/a>Boehlert focuses here on the few years leading up to the last election.\u00a0 He shows how the netroots time after time successfully wrested control of the national narrative away from both conservative propaganda machine and the mainstream media, fiercely practicing what was proudly called reality-based journalism.\u00a0 Through viral videos, rapid-fire exchanges on blogs where the stories were pieced together like mosaics, and old-fashioned reporting, the mostly left-leaning online community in effect picked up the flag that the mainstream media were in the process of dropping.\u00a0 Then, through social media, the netroots organized much of the ground war that elected Barack Obama.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Some examples:\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Bruce Wilson, a blogger who covers the religious right, broke the story<\/a> of a fecklessly anti-Semitic sermon by televangelist \u00fcberpastor John Hagee, forcing John McCain to repudiate Hagee\u2019s long-sought endorsement shortly after it was received;\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Mayhill Fowler, who reported on Obama\u2019s remarks that some small-town voters were \u201cbitter\u201d and \u201ccling to guns or religion,\u201d <\/a>and who also reported Bill Clinton\u2019s attack on Vanity Fair<\/em> reporter Todd Purdum<\/a>, gave first Obama\u2019s campaign, then Hillary Clinton\u2019s, very bad news days;\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The netroots massively rebelled against Congressional efforts to grant telecoms retroactive immunity for their cooperation in NSA\u2019s warrantless wiretaps of Americans, and long delayed its enactment;[Note 1]\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Impressive reportage by Alaskan bloggers broke \u201cTroopergate,\u201dexposed Sarah Palin\u2019s claim to have rejected money for the \u201cBridge to Nowhere,\u201d established Palin\u2019s history with Alaskan secessionism, and, along with the disastrous Katie Couric interview, demolished Palin\u2019s public image over the course of about a month.\u00a0[Note 2]<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The netroots can accomplish much.\u00a0 But hold the cheering.\u00a0 Although the stories just mentioned were legitimate news reporting with legitimate impact, the three most important investigative news stories during the period covered by Bloggers on the Bus<\/em> were Abu Ghraib, the hidden CIA prisons, and the NSA warrantless wiretap program, broken respectively by CBS News<\/a>, the Washington Post<\/a>, and the New York Times<\/a>.\u00a0 This was not an accident.\u00a0 Bloggers are generally not paid at all for what they do; Fowler, for instance, was a volunteer.\u00a0 Mainstream media all maintain paid news staffs with the time and resources, including legal counsel, to dig up and handle these more explosive and sensitive stories.\u00a0 Sensitive news is often costly news.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But cost comes at a cost.\u00a0 Large aggregations of capital are necessary to create a network or a major metropolitan daily.\u00a0 And there are two problems with this.\u00a0 First, as media critic Mark Crispin Miller <\/a>and others<\/a> have been warning us for some time, capital requires capitalists, who never find the priorities of true news consumers to generate adequate returns, and second, market logic impels consolidating media holdings, with the predictable and often intended effect of diminishing the diversity of viewpoints able to be heard.\u00a0 News generation is fitted with blinders, then lashed to a waterlogged and sinking corporate ship.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the contrasting galaxy of a million stars which is the blogosphere, we have witnessed the coalescence of really only one blog, The Huffington Post<\/em>, which has news-gathering power equivalent to that of newspapers, and one blog, Politico<\/em>, which does inside-the-Beltway reporting that renders it a sort of Washington equivalent of the Wall Street Journal<\/em>. \u00a0News generation institutions within the blogosphere to rival those of newspapers and networks are still in their fragile beginnings.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The robustness one can see in the blogosphere lies elsewhere, in influencing public opinion and mobilizing public action.\u00a0 If you want to see serious and informed commentary on news issues of all sorts, the blogs are the best place to go, not a last resort.\u00a0 And if you want to get organized, the blogs and social networks are the places as well.\u00a0 These are functions of great consequence \u2013 and consequences, as Boehlert\u2019s book makes clear.\u00a0 See his accounts of the way the netroots\u2019 firestorm over Chris Matthews\u2019 scornful and sexist remarks about Hillary Clinton after the Iowa\u00a0caucuses tipped the New Hampshire primary her way, and of the brilliant ways in which the Obama campaign harnessed the joint power of social media like Facebook and MySpace to solicit contributions and to create environments where supporters could organize rallies and get-out-the-vote campaigns.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But reporting?\u00a0 Not so much.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is tempting to view the stories told in Boehlert\u2019s two books, one chronicling the failure of the mainstream media to report the news and the other revealing the success of the blogs in doing so, as being parts of the same story.\u00a0 Maybe the mainstream media would not be failing from a business perspective were they not, most of the time, failing from a news-reporting perspective as well.\u00a0 Maybe the blogs would not be succeeding, albeit under their mostly profit-agnostic criteria, were they not beginning to seize the standard of bona fide reporting falling from the grasp of the mainstream media as they tumble lifeless upon the field of economic battle.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Either way, we could soon find ourselves with the blogs as our most important news source.\u00a0 That could be bad.\u00a0 Not only will the blogs have to find a way to succeed as true news-gatherers within what is for now a cash-starved business model, but the whole world of news might need to change.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If every blog is the press, for instance, and everyone can start a blog, then everyone potentially is a member of the press.\u00a0 First Amendment protection will probably not be a big issue[Note 3], but access and ethics problems will most likely be formidable.\u00a0 Who gets to sit in the limited seating of the White House press briefing room?\u00a0 Will blog journalists respect the on-the-record\/off-the-record distinctions that are meaningful with and observed by a better-defined press corps?\u00a0 (Fowler\u2019s scoops on Obama and Bill Clinton suggest otherwise.)\u00a0 What happens to the law of defamation in a world where the boundaries between fact and opinion are so fluid, and speakers are so often anonymous?\u00a0 Without conventional editors, who will oversee proper sourcing of stories?\u00a0 Without the template of newspapers, how easily will readers be able to locate desired coverage?\u00a0 We don\u2019t know.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We may soon find out, though.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
[Note 1]<\/sup><\/sup> See generally Bloggers on the Bus<\/em>, Chapter 11 at 179-206.<\/p>\n