the web The Book Club Blog

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Melinda and Melinda

Woody Allen's latest film grasps at greatness, decides to take itself too seriously instead.

Posted by Nick @ 07:58 GMT

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Sunday, March 13, 2005

The Sunday Times appears committed to discrediting blogs

The Times/News International/News Corporation Limited shows no sign of appreciating the various potential of blogs as they are now being put to use across the internet. But seems content to make a mockery of the blogosphere and its participants. It makes you wonder why these journalists don't just turn off the internet and go and do something less boring instead. Sitting at their desks, writing misleading and uninformed articles bemoaning the efforts of what they imagine to be a unified tribe of "bloggers," is really of so little use to anyone that its hard to imagine why they bother. Cue the usual negative stereotypes and run VT.

The inner world of Joe Blogs: "Everything you never wanted to know about your fellow citizens’ banal daily lives is accessible to you now on the internet,"Allan Brown, The Sunday Times, March 13, 2005

“The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything,” wrote Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “except what is worth knowing.”
Few things bear this out more convincingly than the world of blogging (or, as it winsomely styles itself, the blogosphere). While older readers adjust their ear trumpets, it is perhaps worth pointing out that blogging is the increasingly popular pastime of placing one’s daily diary on the internet, the term blog being a contraction of “web log”.
"Unconstrained by the need to be interesting in any way whatsoever, blogs are the background radiation of the intellectual realm, the white noise of the collective unconscious, scrolling out their narratives whether anybody wishes to read them or not."
"In one sense a Warholian tribute to the fascination of banality, blogs confirm Martin Amis’s claim that where once it was thought that everyone had a book in them, that book has now become an autobiography."
"As astonishing as it is to think that computer geeks might shy from human contact, bloggers, it seems, can be a furtive and elusive bunch, preferring the one-way mirror of their controlled solitude to the messy complexities of real people."
"As with the Google search engine, simplistic page designs are considered to be almost a badge of honour to bloggers: most just feature text, rolling and rambling down the page without interruption from such crowd-pleasing features as pictures. The medium is the message — and both can seem exquisitely dull."
"A one-man Central Office of Information, (Martin) Frost has clearly devoted his life to blogging, with results that make you wonder nervously what he might have done had the internet never been invented."
"The rest, on the other hand, simply make you ponder the processes that denied the bloggers the quotient of recognition and acknowledgment that prevent normal people’s diaries from escaping their desk drawers. "
"Blogs are electronic megaphones, and they turn what was once personal and anecdotal into tiny stitches in the vast tapestry of common knowledge. Virtually none of it is of any use to a reader. But read enough of them, and you suspect that the end-user is the last thing blogging is about."

Update (24th March):
- A good round-up of the responses to Allan Brown's article can be found here:
Sunday Times Scotland doesnae like bloggers, Independence :A personal blog for Scottish independence, by Stuart Dickson. 13 March, 2005
"Allan Brown, the dead-tree journalist assigned by Sunday Times Scotland's Ecosse supplement to scribble a story about Scottish blogging, does not like what he finds. We should not be too surprised. Bloggers, and especially political bloggers, are going to seriously challenge the hegemony of dead-wood newspapers in the foreseeable future....Lordy. And some journalists wonder why they are widely considered to be the rejected spermatozoa of Satan.Bye bye Sunday Times Scotland. When dead-tree media do finally choke on their own expulsions I will not be greetin at the burial."

Posted by Nick @ 08:30 GMT

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Saturday, March 12, 2005

Simon Jenkins takes up the baton - Bloggers versus the media continued

Simon Jenkins has followed the recent example of Iain Duncan Smith and written an article on blogging in one of the internet's free to read publications produced by the so-called "Mainstream Media."
Background:
- Times columnist Simon Jenkins to join the Guardian, January 27, 2005
- He is currently writing a book on politics, to be published by Allen Lane (January 27, 2005?)

Simon Jenkins, "Under my keyboard the desk shakes. The bloggers are on the march," The Times, March 11, 2005
-"What is clear is that the blogosphere has taken the press temporarily by storm... Newpapers have been upstaged successively by the teleprinter, radio, television and now the internet. Each barbarian wave arrives at the gates of Rome and claims to be "resetting the agenda". Each assimilates into the local population."
- "These people claim to be the unofficial legislators of free opinion. They quake, rant, muckrake, scream like 17th-century Puritans. Most of the blog sites regurgitate and spin what the mainstream media (dismissively the “MSM”) has spent millions finding and checking.
- "Most are fanatically conservative. All you need is a taste for exhibitionism and a fancy name: mediabistro (BCB - a networking service for journalists), FishBowlDC (BCB - Bloggers blag way into White House, Times, 8 March, 2005), wonkette. One Yahoo blogger, Ted Rall, (BCB - America's hardest-hitting editorial cartoonist for Universal Press Syndicate, is an award-winning commentator who also works as an illustrator, columnist, and radio commentator.) gives warning of the blogosphere: “A new sheriff’s in town. He’s drunk. He’s mean, and he works for the bad guys.” The web is the Bushites’ revenge on the liberal media establishment. A blog polarises or dies."
- "Yet the ground did shake under me. Earlier threats to the press came from new conduits of news and information. Today’s goes to the heart of my trade. It peddles opinion. I can pretend to occupy a higher plane. I can try pleading factual accuracy, consistency, uncorruptibility and a quote or two from Shakespeare.
- "But in truth I too am a blogger, snatching at some item of passing news to argue a case and persuade. And I charge for it. The blogger does it for nothing. I am on my mettle as never before."
- "So move over, Caxton, the mystery is no more. The whistle-blowers, e-babies, inside-outers, wonkettes, quacks and cranks have globalised Speakers’ Corner. They have rebuilt the Tower of Babel and put microphones on top of it. Amid the noise, a still small voice of reason will still be heard. But it may require the help of Microsoft, not dead trees."

- Which has been pretty thoroughly dissected and rebutted (Fisked) in typical fashion by the Daily Ablution:
The Daily Ablution, "Who's Quaking Now?" March 11, 2005
"Nonsense. A successful blog needn't polarise. A blog interests, informs and entertains or dies - much like a newspaper columnist."
"Journalists who are accurate and honest have little to fear - the facts will out. Their less capable (and less truthful) colleagues risk the humiliation of public ridicule."
"And for me, that - not quaking, ranting or screaming - is what media criticism blogging is all about."

- Harry's Place has also considered Jenkin's article: Quacks and Cranks, 11 March, 2005.
- Jenkins: "The problem for conventional journalism is to prove that such qualities as newsgathering and reliability are worth more than a scream of opinion, enough to get people to part with money. I notice how often blogs refer to items witnessed on television or read in The New York Times. Someone must gather this stuff, check it, source it, write and edit it." - Harry: "Well, of course. We bloggers all know that we need quality articles in the papers in order to have something to discuss. So does Simon Jenkins I would imagine. After all, what would columnists like him write about if there were no reporters to create actual news for him to respond to?
But bloggers, the better ones anyway, do carry out research. They check the sources of newspaper articles, they leave links so that readers can check out their source material."
- Harry: "While American blogs react against the small-c conservatism of the US media, British blogs have, on the whole, been much less interested in the shock-horror reporting that dominates the British papers."
"So while the British press have been obsessed with who has been shagging who at the Spectator or where Charles and Camilla are going to tie the knot, most of the blogs I read have been discussing democratisation in the Middle East. Exactly who is dumbing down discourse?"

- "The Lonely Defense of the MSM," Running Scared: Observations of a former Republican
- "Most bloggers are probably going to take his essay as yet another "bash the bloggers" attack story. I would suggest that Jenkins is different - far more thoughtful, recognizing reality, and offering criticism which often has the ring of truth."
- "I think it's unfair to describe the blogosphere as uniformly conservative. However, if you look at which blogs get all of the attention from the supposedly "liberal" MSM, you can see why. Powerline is easily ten times as well known as Atrios among non-blog readers. It's sad that this is the type of brush being used to paint all bloggers, but understandable at the same time."
- "Owning a computer and starting a free blogger account doesn't immediately put you on the same team with Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts jr."
- "Newspapers cost money and blogs are free. This is not an accident. The old axiom is still true... you get what you pay for in most cases."

- I wonder why Jazz Shaw is still paying for his newspapers. Hasn't the internet made newspapers free to read (once you've bought a PC and paid for a connection - though WiFi networks mean you can often log on for nothing once you've paid £30.00 or so for the relevant gadget), and before the internet came along I seem to remember newspapers being freely available to read at the library which is free to join or simply walk into off the street.

Posted by Nick @ 19:29 GMT

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Dave Allen (6 July 1936 - 10 March 2005) RIP - "Don't mourn for me now, don't mourn for me never - I'm going to do nothing for ever and ever."

Irish comic and satirist Dave Allen died in his sleep on Thursday. "Goodnight, thank you, and may your god go with you."

His target was hypocrisy about sex and religion — and he regularly ridiculed his Roman Catholic roots. The former journalist (he had a brief stint as a reporter on The Drogheda Argus) had his first taste of television came on the BBC talent show New Faces in 1959. He toured Australia in 1963 and was invited to host his own TV chatshow, Tonight with Dave Allen. It ran for 18 months, despite a controversial episode in which he discussed the merits of masturbation with guests Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. He returned to the UK in 1964 and the first episode of the British version of Tonight with Dave Allen went on air four years later. In 1971, BBC2 commissioned Dave Allen at Large, a mixture of straight-to-camera monologues and sketches.
With his background in journalism, Allen's style as a comic emphasised information, presented with a surreal slant. Some called him the "Irish Lenny Bruce" and he was considered one of the first alternative comedians, telling risqué jokes about sex and religion, and his use of strong language even led to questions being asked in the House of Commons. Asked to describe himself in an interview in 1998, he said: "I'm a grumpy old fuck with a sense of humour." He once quipped: “You spend your life working to a point where you don’t have to work. When you reach that point, people say, ‘Why aren’t you working’?”

- He stopped smoking "60 a day" in the 1980s, saying he was fed up with "paying people to kill me."

- On the West End stage:

"In case you wonder what I do," he would tell the audience, "I tend to stroll around and chat. I'd be grateful if you'd refrain from doing the same."

- On TV, his genius was to hold audiences with random observations, such as "Skin is very interesting," spinning into a full-blown but well-honed monologue, with the odd forbidden word. This got him into hot water, especially after he raved on about how lives were dominated by time:

"We spend our lives on the run: we get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work - and then we retire. And what do they give us? A fucking clock."

Robert Haywood, a Tory MP, tabled a Commons question asking the then Home Secretary, David Waddington, to raise the incident with the BBC.
Allen, ever urbane and relaxed, remarked: "Language is there to be used. If you sanitise it, you take everything out of it."

- Ian Davidson, a writer who worked for a decade with Allen, said: "He had so much anger, especially against the priesthood - and that was where he got his energy. He also had a keen sense of the absurd.
"I enjoyed the tales about how he lost part of his finger. I could always tell they were lies. No one knows how he really lost part of his finger." (Allen made a comedy prop of his left index finger — where only a stump remained after a childhood accident.)

- Barry Cryer: "He was so serious and committed, but he proved you could be serious and funny he was our Bill Hicks."

- Frank Skinner: “Dave Allen was a classy, intelligent comic. He was awesome. His punchlines came between swigs.”

- Eddie Izzard said: "He was an original. He carved his own path. I think he was the first alternative stand-up to have his own show on TV, and he was a torch-bearer for all the excellent Irish comics who have followed in recent years.
"I’m glad that his material has just been released on DVD, as it can now be added to the British/Irish library of comedy greats."

-Alan Yentob, said: "I am very shocked and sad to hear of Dave’s death. There was no-one like him - the stool, the smile, the cigarette, the hand gesture, the slow burn. He was a master storyteller, a real original."

- Rik Mayall said: "I’m deeply saddened to hear of Dave Allen’s death. He was an absolute hero from childhood."

- Television producer Paul Jackson, who became friends with Allen after working with him at ITV, remembered the comedian as a "fabulous storyteller".
"You remember his love of argument and complexity," Mr Jackson said yesterday. "He told stories not jokes and through those stories he observed human nature so precisely and was angry at the things in life that should make you angry. He railed against the stupidity of the world and gave voice to a lot of things people think but don't say."

- Allen's agent for 27 years, Vivienne Clore, said the comedian had been unwell over Christmas, but had recovered and was not suffering any life-threatening illnesses. He was still considering new projects at the time of his death and enjoying his garden at his home in west London. He would have been "pissed off" to be described as in semi-retirement.
"He had a natural curiosity about everything and everyone and would build up a close relationship with everyone he worked with."

- Obituaries: Guardian; Telegraph; Scotsman; BBC Report; BBC Tributes; Sun;
- Dave Allen - in his own words - Guardian
- Links: Screen Online biography

Posted by Nick @ 08:30 GMT

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Sunday, March 06, 2005

Book Club Blog Link Log

- Tim Worstall's third weekly BritBlog Roundup has been posted. Check it out!
- Richard Ingrams Diary, Observer, 6th March. What's wrong at the BBC/ The unintended consequence of extending maternity leave/ Blunkett's Online University no longer exists.


- Camille Paglia, "Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s", published in the classics and humanities journal Arion in winter 2003.
- From Camille Paglia (wikipedia)
"One day in New York that summer (1968), she happened to run into Catherine Deneuve on Fifth Avenue and found herself "stalking" her through Saks Fifth Avenue."
- "The North American intellectual tradition," Camille Paglia, Salon, March 04, 2000
"To hell with European philosophers: The breakthroughs of non-European thinkers are the 1960s' greatest legacy."
- From Salon's Ask Camille:
"The brothel episodes in Luis Buñuel's "Belle de Jour" (1967), starring the gorgeously luminous Catherine Deneuve, introduced me to the now widely publicized fact that men of wealth and power often frequent prostitutes for lavish role-reversal scenarios, where the male is abased and enslaved. It's a Babylonian version of penance and absolution."
- Fax Off and Die You Bitch! - The Paglia/Burchill fax war
- The Modern Review, 1991-1999

- PAGLIA WARNS INTERNET: ONLY ART LASTS, Drudge Report Exclusive, 6, March, 2005
""In our voracious 24-hour news cycles, we're rafting down the roaring river of media. It's exciting and exhilarating, but it's good to remember that SOME things last--and they're in art!""
- Harold Bloom/Naomi Wolf - Craig Brown, Telegraph, 28 Feb, 2004
- Wolf/Paglia, Jemima Lewis, Telegraph, 22, February , 2004
- Jackie Danicki, Talking blogs in the City of Angels
"I got a cab back to where I am staying in Park La Brea. Along the way, the driver asked me what I do. “Have you heard of blogs?” I asked. “Of course I’ve heard of blogs!” he replied. “That’s all we hear on the radio all day in our cabs, the conservatives and the liberals are all blogging and it’s all blog-this and blog-that. It’s pretty interesting.”"

Posted by Nick @ 17:25 GMT

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Friday, March 04, 2005

Blogging and Campaign finance reform

- As Talon News undergoes a review of operations in light of the recent controversy surrounding the case of James Guckert/Jeff Gannon it appears that political activity on the internet and political blogging are posing serious dilemmas for the Federal Election Commission as it seeks a way to define whether a blog post or a hyperlink on a blog to a candidate's website or indeed, their blog, amounts to a campaign contribution, and what the monetary value of such a contribution should be. How exciting!

- Declan McCullagh, "The coming crackdown on blogging" (interview with Bradley Smith one of the six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission which is beginning the process of extending a 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet), CNet/News.com, Mar. 3).
- "Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over. In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign's Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate's press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines."
- Smith: "I don't think the Democratic commissioners are sitting around saying that the Internet is working to the advantage of the Republicans."
- Smith: "The judge's decision is in no way limited to ads. She says that any coordinated activity over the Internet would need to be regulated, as a minimum. The problem with coordinated activity over the Internet is that it will strike, as a minimum, Internet reporting services.
They're exempt from regulation only because of the press exemption. But people have been arguing that the Internet doesn't fit under the press exemption. It becomes a really complex issue that would strike deep into the heart of the Internet and the bloggers who are writing out there today."

(CNET Editor's note: federal law limits the press exemption to a "broadcasting station, newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication.")
- (via Jon; via Overlawyered.com)
- McCain-Feingold

Posted by Nick @ 10:50 GMT

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Thursday, March 03, 2005

A Call to Keyboards for the Pajamahadin - "What is to be done?"

In the wake of non-blogging Iain Duncan Smith's bizarre recognition of the potential of blogs to jettison Michael Howard into Number 10 (?!), John Lloyd's misplaced fears about the threat of blogging to "public-spirited journalism, Jackie Danicki's doubts about an LSE panel's understanding or appreciation of the blogosphere, and bemusement and resignation among some British bloggers at the failure of British blogs to follow the trailblazing example of their American cousins and rise up and be counted - comes an exhortation to British bloggers to take their responsibilities more seriously.

- The bloggers shall inherit the Gonzo, Paul Carr, Guardian, Monday February 28, 2005
- Bloggers: It's time for the weird to turn pro, Tai Pei Times, By Paul Carr, THE GUARDIAN , LONDON Thursday, Mar 03, 2005,Page 9.

- Paul Carr is editor-in-chief of the Friday Project (www.thefridayproject.co.uk).
Endorsement from an old friend:
"The Friday Thing is so good it's stopping me from doing a bunk of a Friday afternoon." - Annie Blinkhorn (The Erotic Review)
- He points out that he has nothing to do with The Friday Night Project - the questionable CH4 television programme hosted by Jimmy Carr (presumable no relation).

- This chap seems to be on our wavelenghth. But what does he think the Book Club Blog has been doing?

"The story had broken too late to catch the morning papers, so the first I heard of the death of the greatest journalist ever was from a list of search results."
I tried to write an instant obituary of sorts for the Friday Thing but as I started surfing for background information, I realised that there was no point. Hundreds of ezines and blogs had already begun chronicling the life of the great man, linking to snippets of his work, and considering why he might choose to take his own life at this time.
The world needed Thompson most during the Nixon era - and he delivered, in spades. If, 30 years on, we still have not found a replacement, then that is the world's failing, not his. But the bloggers do have a point - no matter what Will Self's nocturnal fantasies might lead him to believe, there is no obvious heir to the Gonzo throne.
And yet consider Thompson's modus operandi. He was fiercely opinionated; he documented almost every aspect of his life, as if not committing something to paper meant it had not really happened; he used the power of the fax to get answers from people in power (the equivalent today would be email); he consumed the media as if his life depended on it, tearing it apart and writing up the results for a potential audience of millions ... If he wasn't the archetypal blogger I don't know who was.
With the traditional media, particularly in the US, rapidly turning to unquestioning mush, and blogs being responsible for more and more muckraking and story-breaking, Thompson's death is the perfect time for bloggers to be recognised as the nearest thing we have to Gonzo journalism. There is just one problem - with very few exceptions, bloggers are embarrassingly, pathetically lazy. When Thompson got excited by a story, he would get on a plane and make himself part of it.
How could he know what was really going on if he never left his "heavily fortified compound" in Woody Creek? And yet hand most bloggers a tip on a silver platter and they will publish it verbatim, without so much as follow-up phonecall.

- You reckon?

Of course, there are good reasons why bloggers can not be as dedicated as Thompson was. Firstly, Thompson was paid for his work while bloggers do it for love and the occasional Paypal donation. Secondly, Thompson had press accreditation to major events while bloggers do not.

Sites such as Gawker and Wonkette have shown that advertisers are more than willing to pay handsomely for first-person online journalism, especially if it is edgy and has a unique voice.
And that is before you consider the spin-off opportunities that have been realised by the likes of the Baghdad Blogger and Belle de Jour.
And as for access - anyone with a decent audience and even cursory blagging skills can get accreditation to cover almost anything (our writers were gaining access to ministers and arms fairs months before anyone had heard of us). The money and access are there for the taking - you have just got to want them."

"It is time for bloggers Bloggers, or pajamahidin as they've been called, to start taking their responsibilities seriously. That means putting on their reporting shoes, leaving their bedrooms, buying a notepad and throwing themselves into covering the stories that no one in the traditional media would dare to, or care to.
US President George W Bush is our former US president Richard Nixon, Google is our Rolling Stone, the going has got weird -- and it's time for the weird to turn pro."

Update:
- Mystery surrounds HST's last typed word: "Counselor", Guardian, March 3, 2005
-

Posted by Nick @ 08:28 GMT

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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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