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Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Bloggers, the Main Stream Media, and a tale of two Presidents

Harry at Harry's Place ("Bloggers v The Media" plus interesting comment discussion) reacts to last night's LSE Media Group Event 'The Fall and Fall of Journalism' which set out to:

"explore the challenges presented to traditional media by the new breed of "citizen reporters", bloggers and "nearly journalists". Following on from recent discussions in the press sparked by John Lloyd, editor of the FT Magazine's claim that journalists live in a "parallel universe" and The Guardian's follow-up article "Do They Mean Us?" where over 50 people, those who allegedly 'run Britain', were asked the simple question "What do you think of journalists?" the debate will seek to expose an industry where the values of credibility and trust have been undermined not only by consolidation among news providers but also by a lack of respect for accuracy."

Harry notes that Jackie Danicki attended the event and was clearly not very impressed with the standard of the debate and the panel's understanding of the nature of blogs the and ways in which they interact with and complement existing journalism and media.

Danicki's excellent article is entitled "The Fall and Fall of Blogging Debate in Britain" and deserves to be read and digested in full by anyone interested in understanding the potential and future of blogging, particularly in Britain, where it seems to have some catching up to do with developments, and the understanding and appreciation of them, elsewhere.

Danicki': "If everyone’s main concern was the truth and how we get to it....what seemed to be missing was a basic understanding of exactly how and why blogs really are fundamentally different from traditional journalism."
"What no one on the panel seemed willing to point out, if they did indeed know it, was that the aim of bloggers is not to replace traditional journalists. While definitely not a collective, as some panel members seemed to believe, the blogosphere is made up of individuals whose motivations for revealing truth and correcting untruth are not borne of a desire to bring down the media."
"What really gets to people is sloppy reporting, spin presented as fact, and audiences being misled.
"The internet is not a broadcast channel, but a two-way conversation whose one-to-many information distribution differs significantly and inherently from that of traditional media."

- Further consideration by Mike Fealty at SLUGGER O'TOOLE Notes on Northern Ireland politics and culture.
- More from Martin Stabe - part 1, part 2.
- Harry's Place Q&A with John Lloyd

Harry asks an interesting question:
"Just where has this notion that blogs are out to try and compete with or replace mainstream journalism come from?"
and makes the point that:
"Political blogging is much more about politics than media. If we must compare it to anything I'd say it most closely ressembles the old pamphleteer tradition. People putting out ideas and looking for like-minded people to join in discussion and activity. Personally I really couldn't give a hoot about the 'role of blogs in a pluralist media' or whatever. To me blogging is my way of being involved in politics and having my say - and I like it. And from that point of view blogging also works. After all this blog gets more hits in a week than Socialist Worker has readers and we don't even have to send students out to stand in front of Sainsbury's on a Saturday morning."
Concluding that
"In the end, while there is huge potential for people in politics, business, education and many other areas, a blog is a piece of software and you can do what you want with it. People will take it or leave it."

Which all makes perfect sense.

This is interesting in light of recent considerations on the Book Club Blog regarding differences between the British and America blogospheres, that were partly stimulated by Iain Duncan Smith's recent piece in the Guardian in which he suggested that blogging could provide a means by which to reinvigorate British conservatism.

A politically conscious blogosphere does appear to have evolved more rapidly in America than in Britain, as evinced by the recent fates of Dan Rather, Eason Jordan and James Guckert/Jeff Gannon. Numerous prominent individual bloggers, and the ever spiralling networks emanating out from and back towards them, have emerged from the medium in the US to make visible impacts on the national political debate the equal of which have not been apparent in the UK.

To such an extent that Richard Wolffe, writing in the current issue of Newsweek, reports that when President Bush recently confronted his Russian counterpart about the freedom of the press in Russia, Putin shot back with an attack of his own: "We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS." Wolffe goes on to say that:
"It's not clear how well Putin understands the controversy that led to the dismissal of four CBS journalists over the discredited report on Bush's National Guard service. Yet it's all too clear how Putin sees the relationship between Bush and the American media—just like his own."

It was suggested to me that perhaps "Putin hasn't been reading up on his blogging (or his John Lloyd)" in light of Lloyd's recent article on blogging in the FT (25th February, 2005) - "The anti-people plot" - in which he compares the populist (both rightist and leftist) anti-establishment message that has long informed tabloid journalism in Germany, Italy, America, Britain and Australia to the spirit that now informs the world of blogs. Lloyd points out that blogs "can also take left and right colouring," but echoing Iain Duncan Smith's analysis, he suggests that they "have recently seemed more influential when on the right." Indeed, having argued that the US blogosphere is predominantly engaged in a war on the mainstream media - "the elite, snobbish, anti-people target of choice" - Lloyd concludes that:
"”The truth will set you free!” was once a motto on socialist and trade union banners. It has now been taken up by the right, and it is changing the face of journalism."

All of which got me thinking that President Putin may well understand US blogging campaigns to oust "liberal" figures in the "mainstream media" better than Newsweek's Richard Wolfe would like his readership to believe.

It has been widely reported just how adept Karl Rove has become at exploiting unconventional methods for the purposes of manipulating coverage of the Bush White House, setting the national agenda, and generally silencing or dispensing with those critical of the neo-con mantra.
In the way that Newt Gingrich understood the rise of a populist new right across the dials of American talk radio during the 1990s, Rove appears to understand the blogosphere and the terrain of mass sensibilities far better than any opposite number in the Democrat ranks.
Current Republican hegemony is not simply accounted for by the lack of cohesiveness and unity on the left or the fact that the left's message is more complicated and detailed than that of the right. It was ever so. Though these factors clearly play their role in making the job of Rove, his salaried bloggers and planted White House journalists, far easier than it should be.

No. What has really aided the Bush Whitehouse in its bid to take control of and dominate the political debate in America, and with it the recent election, has been their affinity with, insight into, and organisational skills in responding to the emergence of the blogosphere's new journalism.

Given the context, this is naturally populist, and predominantly right wing, "independent," and libertarian in the American tradition of suspicion for elites, cosmopolitanism, corporations, authority and the nuances of a liberal education and mind.

Sure, there are liberal bloggers too, but they tend to reinforce the minority message emanating from the universities, the "cities" of the coastal extremities, and to a degree the sophisticated analysis available from the establishment's "liberal press" and "national television corporations." Demographically speaking though, and in terms of the popular majority that swept the White House, the majority of politically conscious and active Americans are more inclined to sympathies similarly and equally critical of liberal bloggers and the "mainstream media."
This is where the Bush brand of pseudo-Reaganite neo-conservatism comes into its own. For just as Reagan lived the life of a Hollywood king blessed with the trappings of wealth and privilege far removed from the reality of ordinary Americans, yet propelled himself to power as a democratic, egalitarian man of, and friend to the American people, so the same is true of his successors.

They went to the same universities, trained for the same professions, run similar corporations, and live much the same day to day lives as their political opponents, and yet the mandarins of Bush Republicanism set themselves politically in contradistinction to the institutions they inhabit.

They are the outsiders on the inside, and in so being are able to concur and resonate with the will of the true populist outsiders of the blogosphere, who may in fact actually be just as much a part of the American establishment as they are.

For whilst professional journalists seem keen to identify a lack of professionalism, education, and fact-checking scrupulousness on the part of bloggers, the bloggers who have succeeded in building up substantial enough readerships, in the thoroughly democratic and fundamentally competitive world of free-to-read online personal publishing, to have themselves heard above the cacophony and make an impact on the national consciousess, are just as likely academics, lawyers, businessman and very often professional journalists themselves who have found a conduit through which they are able to better express themselves more eloquently, more substantively and more forcefully than ever before or any place else.

This has meant that whereas the conclusion of the Watergate scandal marked the high water-mark of the mainstream liberal news media's ability to uncover corruption amidst America's political class, so the fates of CBS news anchor Dan Rather and CNN head of news Eason Jordan demonstrate the extent to which the scrutiny applied to figures of authority by Woodward and Bernstein has been embraced by the subsequent generation and democratised in its applicability by the blogosphere, ironically more often than not in service to those suspicious of the motives of its traditional practitioners. The sons of Nixon can thus avenge their father's slayers.

The nature and extent of press freedoms and state control of the media in the United States and Russia are almost incomparably different. President Putin does not have to contend with a vital democratic tradition and inalienable penchant for public debate stretching back almost 230 years to the founding of the American Republic, and still further to the public meeting halls and church sermons of the colonies and beyond. Likewise, President Bush is not wrestling a nascent democratic culture into being in the shadow of a decomposing bureaucratic structure of totalitarian state censorship and control. It is almost absurd for the two men to engage in a discourse that in any way equates their different contexts.

However, in responding to being confronted by Bush with regard to the freedom of the press in Russia, by reminding the American President that "We didn't criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS," Vladimir Putin was not as far wide of the mark as the President and his place-men in the press would have the world believe. Indeed, far from demonstrating his ignorance of the blogosphere and the nuanced possibilities it offers up for enhancing democratic political systems, Putin was perhaps revealing his appreciation of the way in which ruling elites within democracies are able to interact with their masses in order to perpetuate a system in which they manage both to serve and control them. For as I suspect Mr Bush and Mr Putin are both profoundly aware, the tail very rarely wags the dog.

Update:
- Bobbie Johnson, "Posting for profit," Guardian, Thursday February 24, 2005.
"As weblogs soar in number and influence, their business potential lands many in the money."
"It's possible for an individual, skillful blogger to have income from a blog," says Adriana Cronin-Lukas, a consultant for fledgling firm the Big Blog Company (www.bigblogcompany.net), and a serious weblogging evangelist. "But ultimately it is the communications aspect of the blog that brings money in - by blogging about a company or expertise."

Posted by Nick @ 00:06 GMT

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