If you're reading this, you are most likely aware of the supposedly tremendous impact that blogs have had upon political discourse in this country. I'm here to tell you, on my blog of course, that the whole thing is way overblown. Bloggers and blog denizens make several arguments to justify the assertion that the internet is revolutionizing the media and political reporting:
1) The mainstream media is declining in popularity and influence.
While somewhat true, the idea that this somehow demonstrates that blogs are making a serious dent in mainstream media consumption is absurd at this point. Although the major television networks have undergone a significant decline in viewership, most of these viewers have been redirected to cable. Cable television is essentially run by the same type of corporate oligarchy that operates network TV (Fox, Turner, Disney, General Electric, CBS). Also, although newspaper readership may be down somewhat, major newspaper websites still crush blogs in traffic rankings. From my cursory research, WSJ, WaPo, NYT and the Star Tribune all have significantly higher traffic than DailyKos. DailyKos is by far the most visited and popular political blog. The lesson: content is king. Blogs don't have the resources to report the news and create real original content, and until they are able to pay and outfit reporters, they will always be secondary to the mainstream media.
2) Despite a smaller audience, blogs have influenced the media by keeping the oligarchy accountable
Bloggers and their allies will point to recent media scandals like Jason Blair at the New York Times, the Newsweek Quran story and Rathergate to demonstrate that the mainstream media is losing its reputation. Although there have been a few reporting issues in the last year, this is a prime example of bloggers throwing stones from a glass house. If you look at blogs on a given day, you will find what is essentially a bunch of garbage accusing the media of being to liberal or conservative, depending on the point of view. If anybody ever tried to hold a particular blog accountable over an extended period of time, I have no doubt one could find misrepresentations and falsehoods weekly. Nobody cares about this, though, since blogs are largely unimportant. In a sense, blogs are using irrelevance to assert their relevance as a watchdog group. Furthermore, blogs will always be dependent on the mainstream media to report the stories. Go read a blog, and notice that they all link in mainstream sources whenever something comes up.
3) OK, blogs will never replace the mainstream media as news reporting agencies, but the opinions columnists are doomed.
Is everybody reading the same blogs here? Most blogs are just a bunch of partisan hackery. DailyKos is interesting if you want to see intelligent debate within the Democratic Party, as is Redstate for the Republicans. The only blog that provides real independent analysis, however, is Andrew Sullivan. He's a mainstream writer too. The point is, you can find any opinion you want on blogs, but you have to sift through a lot of garbage to find the good ones. There are very few bloggers who consistently offer good and independent opinions. You can count on the New York Times columnists for thoughtful opinions from across the ideological spectrum, all the way from Dowd and Krugman to Tierney. So for people who don't have all day to surf through the blogosphere, and want to consider all kinds of good opinions, the columnists are here to stay. What blogs represent is an increasing ability to filter the kind of opinions we hear. This is a dangerous development, and allows people to cocoon themselves within an ideology and simply strengthen their existing dogmas. Thus, if blogs are replacing columnists, it's probably a bad thing.
4) The influence of the internet as a political organizing mechanism should not be discounted.
I can actually agree with this. Blogs have the unique ability to bring like minded people from all across the country together at an extremely low cost. Thus, blogs have great potential as political influencers. However, Kos is the only community so far that has come close to harnessing this potential. Also, the mainstream media was never supposed to be an organizer, so there is an unoccupied niche here for blogs.
2 Kommentare:
I think you dont give enough credit to the "accountability" arguement. Look to "memo-gate". It was conservative bloggers that brought that to everyone's attention. The other important role that blogs play is picking up the stories that networks miss. Like the downing street memo. As dkos readers know, that site and many other progressive blogs worked hard to point out the lack of coverage that was being given to the memo in the US.
I see what your saying about accountibility. And it's good that they're able to bring issues to the fore. But read Captain's Quarters or Powerline on the one side and Atrios and Kos on the other, and you'd get a very skewed picture of what's going on. We've had this discussion before... a Republican arguing with a Democrat doesn't make fact.
Bloggers throw up a lot of bullshit, so they do get a few things (DSM, Rather) to stick. I give them credit for their persistent activism which has helped hold the media accountable, nothing for reporting or journalism.
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