Buying the War
A useful reminder that there are worse people than Ben Adler. (And here’s a link to the chat with Knight-Ridder/McClatchy’s Strobel and Landay.) The most quotable stuff for me was . . .
. . . the KR bureau chief saying, Our readers aren’t the people who decide whether to send other people’s children off to war. They’re the people who go.
. . . Walter Pincus’ formulation that the media “have become common carriers” for the statements of the government and the opposition [such as it may be].
The most challenging material for the libertarian in me was the stuff about pressure from advertisers, and Dan Rather’s laying off of blame on things that “nobody has to send us a memo about.” Even there, though, Rather himself makes the point that the corporations that own CBS and other media “have massive regulatory needs” from the government.
Isaacson’s statement that pundits are cheaper than real reporters and real bureaus was important, and something I hadn’t properly considered before. On the other hand, servile reporters not only cost money, but provide the illusion of rigor that pundits don’t.
I do think Moyers could get an hour out of a good show on the role The Blogosphere played in the buying of the war. “Conservative bloggers” got the briefest of shoutouts in tonights story, liberal bloggers none at all, and the seepage at the boundaries between Left and Right and Prowar and Antiwar nothing either. The good show would explain that The Blogosphere performed two distinct functions throughout 2002 and early 2003: part of it amplified the Administration’s case and acted to ridicule anyone dissenting from it, but another part of it provided the criticism all but missing in the bigtime print and screen outlets. The first group were largely but not exclusively “conservative.” The second group was largely but not exclusively “liberal.”
Such a show would have to consider the question of whether either group of bloggers genuinely mattered. I go back and forth on that question.
Comment by SomeCallMeTim —
April 25, 2007 @ 11:34 pm
Now angry again.
Comment by Nell —
April 26, 2007 @ 5:49 am
whether either group of bloggers genuinely mattered
I wouldn’t presume to say much about the impact of the antiwar bloggers as a whole, on big outward events. But I know that they (including you) helped me maintain my sanity and gave me confidence and courage during the period when there was very little antiwar activity. And I have a feeling that experience is shared by many, many people.
That internal support — the visible proof that we weren’t alone in having important doubts and questions that had been brushed aside by media and politicians — helped generate, for instance, the strength of the grassroots response to Howard Dean’s campaign. And that campaign itself began to change the balance of power in the Democratic Party.
I emphasize began to change, because nothing terribly significant or lasting has been won yet. The insane clown posse in power did most of the work themselves.
But the object lessons from the trajectory of warbloggers and antiwar bloggers over the last five and a half years — about credibility and groupthink, and the influence of fear on discussion and on reporting — have been and are being absorbed. For the most part, I think people are drawing the right lessons.
One of which is that blogs are still far more capable of getting at the fundamentals of issues than the bubble-ized media and pundit corps. They’ve changed very, very little despite the huge failures. Contrast that with what’s happened inside the blog world, where people really do pay a price for being ludicrously wrong again and again.
Comment by Thoreau —
April 26, 2007 @ 7:41 am
Contrast that with what’s happened inside the blog world, where people really do pay a price for being ludicrously wrong again and again.
You saying Glenn Reynolds doesn’t get readers?
Comment by Nell —
April 26, 2007 @ 2:35 pm
Oh, sure, he has lots of readers as RW blogs go. But pretty much only 25-percenters take him seriously, don’t you think?
For a while after September 11, 2001, he was required reading for people who wanted to avoid relying entirely on reflexively liberal or left perspectives. Then he got to be so knee-jerk and dishonest himself that he was useless in that function.
He continued to be portrayed in mainstream media as some kind of reasonable representative of bloggers as a whole for much longer than he actually had the respect of the bulk of bloggers and blog readers, though. His respect trajectory has closely tracked Bush’s, I’d say.
And as with Bush, tolerances differed. I stopped reading Reynolds in January 2002, but then I’d naturally be an “early un-adopter”: I’m a left-winger with thirty-five years of political activism behind me. Also, the entrance into the blog world in that period of people like Tom Tomorrow, Max Sawicky and Jeanne d’Arc helped me recover confidence in my worldview.
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
April 26, 2007 @ 3:23 pm
I am unconvinced that any kind of civic opinion mattered at all. I was pro-war at the time (until Abu Ghraib, when I switched to Get Out Now), but I remember being astonished (and not a little disturbed) when the British government decided to go to war. This is because 1 in 60 Britons showed up at a single anti-war demonstration, and since only the people who care the most will show up at demonstrations, this meant that actual public opposition to British participation must have been both deep and broad. And it didn’t matter.
Comment by Nell —
April 26, 2007 @ 3:35 pm
Neel, maybe it didn’t actually stop or change the policy, but surely it mattered in terms of the politics that have developed in the last five years there? In the resistance of citizens to official lies and spin?
Comment by Neel Krishnaswami —
April 26, 2007 @ 5:19 pm
Nell, I take your point, and I don’t really know the answer.
From my own personal experience, I believe it does make a big difference — when I came to college, I was exposed to the idea that most of the fault in the Waco disaster lay with the Feds for the very first time. That was seriously outside my frame of reference, even though I think I was better-informed than average. I can’t help but believe that the spread of Internet fora has made it easier for people who are beginning to get interested in political questions to discover viewpoints outside the conventional wisdom. But I don’t know, since there’s so much contingency and haphazardness in how I came to believe what I do that I’m afraid to generalize.