All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Bloggers have a way of swarming. And a swarm is pretty much what happened when one blogger pointed out a factual error in a recent post from Washington, D.C., bureau chief Jay Carney on Time's new Swampland blog. Rick Perlstein at The New Republic outlines the play by play here. In a nutshell, what happened is this: after one blogger found an error, other bloggers took a close look at Carney's post and pointed out a few more in the comments section. Eventually, "the commenters unraveled the entire foundation of Carney's argument."

There was, as typically accompanies these types of dustups, some rude back and forth between author and commenters. But ultimately, writes Perlstein, "Carney was rude and wrong. The barbaric yawpers of the netroots were rude and right."

The whole tiff is but one example of how bloggers are ushering in a "new, more uncomfortable media world," writes Perlstein, "one in which, to judge a piece of writing, we must gauge not the status of the writer, but his or her words themselves, unattached to the author's worldly rank." And that's "all right" with him.

It's also created a world in which traditional media are competing with more than just themselves – bloggers are, increasingly, seen as rivals.

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Last night, the NBC “Nightly News” aired a story on the growing number and influence of blogs – you can watch it here. “What started as lonely voices from laptops are a growing influence in the mainstream media,” correspondent Dawn Fratangelo said in the piece, “Most every news outlet — including our own — now has at least one.”

In the world of media-watching (you’re in it right now) this is not a novel piece of news. The subject has been hashed, and re-hashed, and hashed some more. So, somewhat predictably, some bloggers have reacted to the story with nice helping of snark. Wrote Dreadpundit:

It was one of those newsbits that make you wonder in what decade the mainstream media are living. NBC ran a condescending little piece about blogs as if it were a discovery they had just made (maybe it was.) Now we're "real," we've been on the nightly news.

But in their montage of screenshots and happy patter (including a brief view of The Jawa Report's main [page] - another blog I write for) NBC anchor Brian Williams didn't mention the names of Dan Rather or Eason Jordan.

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Is the blogosphere full of citizen journalists who, with a seemingly limitless supply of bandwidth and resources at their fingertips, are becoming a powerful addition to the mainstream media? Or is it in danger of slipping into the 21st Century version of cable talk shows, where those who can shout their outrage the loudest get the most attention?

Discussion about the blogosphere has long included two topics that generate a tremendous amount of impassioned feelings on all sides. The first is the value of bloggers as journalists. Blogging champions tout the ability of blogs to perform as well, if not better, than traditional news organizations in exploring stories and issues, digging up information and connections and breaking news. Even some of their biggest critics acknowledge at times that bloggers perform valuable services in that area.

The second oft-discussed topic about the blogosphere has been civility, or lack thereof. There are plenty of examples about the issue of civility, enough to make you start thinking that raw discourse is simply part of the whole deal. But could all this unbridled, unchecked and unfiltered anger be having a real impact on the blogosphere as a whole?

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week, we turned to National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty, who writes the TKS blog on National Review Online, and contributes to another group blog, OnTapblog.com. Below, he discusses where progress in the blogosphere has been achieved, and where it hasn’t. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Here's Jim:

Détente With Mordor

Back in the really fun days of blogging, summer 2004, a bunch of folks typing on the Internet had a bone to pick with a particular network news division over a quartet of memos that had inspired a wee bit of controversy. At that time I wrote, "Sure, the Sauronic Big Eye of CBS is on the verge of being toppled by the Pajamahadeen…"

("Sauronic Big Eye" was a reference to the network's logo and the villain from “Lord of the Rings,” and “pajamahadeen” was my attempt at an intimidating moniker based on former CBS executive Jonathan Klein's comment that the bloggers questioning the memos were just "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas.")

At the time, the network had earned its comparison to a giant flaming embodiment of evil because of its stubborn refusal to acknowledge that it's memos allegedly from 1972 had a striking resemblance to Microsoft Word from 2004, as well as anchor Dan Rather's on-air dismissal of his critics as mere "partisan political operators." CBS ultimately admitted it could not verify the origin of the documents, and revealed that their source had misled the reporters on where he had obtained them.

It's about a year and a half later, and we've seen two differing trends in the antagonists in that fight. One is that CBS News has gotten a bit better and more responsible; and the other is that a significant portion of the blogosphere has, I humbly suggest, gone sour.

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If you’re anything like most self-respecting news junkies, perhaps you’ve been spending much of your day separating fact from fiction regarding a certain pending U.S. port deal with Dubai. Noting that this story might have reached a fever pitch earlier this month if it hadn’t been overshadowed by a certain hunting accident in Texas, Howard Kurtz today tracks the story from it’s first nearly unnoticed appearance on the wires to it’s veritable explosion on the editorial pages, blogs and politicians’ press releases.

Following the trajectory of a story like this one, you might have started thinking you were witnessing a footnote to a lot of the recent chatter about why the blogosphere could never replace the traditional media. (Of course, that might have been just me, because I tend to read any and every article that includes the word “blog” in it these days.)

At National Review’s TKS, Jim Geraghty doesn’t place the blame squarely on the blogosphere, but admits that he and his “fellow bloggers “have been snookered” by this story:

The controversy over this port sale have been driven by a great deal of vague, ominous and sloppy language thrown around by lawmakers, the media and bloggers. Had this discussion been marked by a precision and focus on just what was at stake, this would not have turned into the brouhaha it did.

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“Isn’t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?” Trevor Butterworth wonders in the Financial Times today (thanks, Romenesko) in a lengthy – but insightful – piece that serves as both a brief history of the effect of that phenomenon known as the blogosphere as well as a skeptical look at how much of an effect it will really have on that mainstream media that it chastises so much.

He goes to some of the ringleaders of this media revolution, who seem to agree that a revolution … it is not. Says Choire Sicha, former editor of Gawker (which at this writing, is in Technorati’s Top 20 most popular blogs) :

“As for blogs taking over big media in the next five years? Fine, sure … But where are the beginnings of that? Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds.

Ana Marie Cox, who recently quasi-abandoned the ever-popular Wonkette to write books, agreed: “I just don’t see the ‘lumbering dinosaurs of mainstream media’ - there’s no asteroid coming.” It’s a worthwhile look at the nature of the blog-beast and its own potential to remain relevant – as it often seeks to question the relevance of the media that preceded it.

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If, like me, you spend a good deal of your time reading blogs, you are all too familiar with one phrase (and its abbreviation) and the vitriol that so often accompanies its mention: mainstream media. MSM.



My personal favorite analysis on the subject comes from William Wolfe, who attempted to parse the hatred at McSweeney’s:

Reasons Bloggers Hate the Mainstream Media.


The MSM is too liberal.

Professor always calls on the MSM.

Bloggers got stood up at prom. By the MSM.

But it was Franklin Foer who, in a recent piece in The New Republic, (predictably) struck a chord when he took a swing at the MSB (mainstream blogosphere) for taking swings at the MSM (got all that straight?):

"The mainstream blogosphere (MSB) is only too happy to bury the old media regime, because it has an implicit vision for a new order, one that would largely consist of ... bloggers. In other words, they envision a universe that resembles the nineteenth-century partisan newspapers or the Fleet Street model, where writers and thinkers break from the illusion of "objectivity" and print the "truth." (I acknowledge that the liberal blogosphere is hardly a monolith and that blogs don't always lend themselves to coherent thought, but common themes and arguments are clear enough.)"

Following the “flurry of responses, not all of them friendly,” to the piece, Foer addressed what he felt was readers' literal-minded interpretation of his point:

“People have taken my coinage 'Mainstream Blogosphere' seriously. But I'll be the first to concede that it's a dumb, adolescent term. I simply wanted to highlight the stupidity of the ubiquitous 'Mainstream Media.' There are, of course, lots of liberal bloggers that I respect (e.g. Marshall, Yglesias, Drum) for their reporting, analytical capabilities, and writing. And they shouldn't be lumped with the likes of the ranters and cheap shot artists who I have critiqued. Similarly, CNN, NPR, and The Washington Post are very different beasts, who don't deserve to be polemically lumped together so often. That's just sloppy.

And that set off a semantic argument from Atrios at his blog.

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While the fate of Stanley “Tookie” Williams drew plenty of attention in the in the mainstream media, many in the blogosphere – on the right and the left (Battlepanda has assembled a list of them, conveniently organized by political ideology) – have been lamenting the lack of similar attention to the death penalty case of Cory Maye. Maye is on death row for killing a police officer. Radley Balko of the libertarian blog The Agitator was first to blog about Maye, and those who have followed seem to agree that Maye is the victim of overzealous police and racial bias and doesn’t deserve the death penalty.

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Today's nomination unleashed a host of predictable reactions from the usual suspects in the form of the ever-powerful, mass e-mailed press release. Reaction from the blogosphere offered similarly expected predictions of partisan armageddon.

The Moderate Voice sees a not-so-moderate reaction from Democrats:

Bush has now fulfilled an oft-stated promise to conservatives and other Americans who voted for him for a direction-change in the court.

But Alito's nomination is certain to spark a vigorous battle from Democrats since his solid conservative credentials mean the days of the O'Connor swing vote on the court are now over.

Kevin Drum predicts partisan warfare:

No stealth candidate this time.

The movement conservatives wanted a war, and this time they've probably gotten one. I guess Bush was itching for revenge after Scooter Libby got indicted.

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