This is this first in a series of discussion on MyDD that focuses on an essay in Get This Party Started. All discussions will be led by the author of the essay in question. Next Thursday, our guest will be Alan Abramowitz. On February 9th, our guest will be Anna Greenberg. Future guests will be announced when they are scheduled.
My article in
Get This Party Started is entitled "Blogging for Political Change." I wrote this essay back in late April and early May of 2005, under the premise that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for existing stakeholders in the progressive movement to understand how to work with blogs, bloggers and the blogosphere if they do not understand how blogs, bloggers and the blogosphere operates. It is in this sense that my essay is part of my larger project to help educate progressive stakeholders and the Democratic establishment about the nature of the progressive blogosphere. One other such prominent work in this project as the paper I co-authored with Matt for the New Politics Institute:
The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere. If major stakeholders in the progressive community do not even understand blogs, how can we ever hope to have a more successful, productive relationship with these stakeholders?
Of course, one of the major difficulties in writing a definitional piece on progressive political blogging such as "Blogging for Political Change," is that theories on the nature of the blogosphere are always changing and building upon one another. In particular, since August my work on understanding the blogosphere has been, at the very least, equaled (and probably surpassed) by the great blogosphere theorist
Peter Daou. And there are of course those two guys who know a little something about blogging, Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, who have
a new book out that you may have heard of that touches on blogging a little bit.
My basic theory, as it stood in April and May, is that political blogging was best understood as a new type of journalism that differs from the established institutions of journalism in terms of what it views as its primary goal. For example, the following passage from the essay might look familiar to long-time readers of MyDD:
There is a striking similarity between these characteristics of avant-garde art and blogging, which served as the basis for the claim I made to Andy about the similarity between bloggers and avant-garde artists such as Ginsberg and Kerouac. The various avant-garde movements of the past century (and there are probably close to one hundred), produced their own journals, ran their own theaters, wrote their own criticism, made their own publicity, developed their own audiences, generated their own networks, became their own editors, solicited their own projects, bought their own printing materials, secured their own gallery space, ran their own bookstores and, in short, developed full-fledged artistic counter-institutions (even artistic counter-economies). In fact, many movements developed counter-institutions that were so strong that the movements became internationally famous (The Beats, Language poets, dada, Surrealists, etc).
Similarly, in reaction to the mainstream media, the progressive political blogosphere (a blogosphere is a network of blogs) has developed into a full-fledged counter-institution for the production, judgment, distribution and consumption of political writing. We are our own editors, publishers and publicists. We create our own websites, pay for many of our own servers and bandwidth, develop our own networks, and even hold our own award competitions. In addition to on site reporting from countless local and statewide event, we produce original, on-site reporting from major events such as the Iraq war and national political conventions. We develop original research on polling information and political strategy. We interview leading figures in American politics, and even have live, open-ended conversations with them on our blogs. In short, we have created an entire underground world of political news that operates independently of established, mainstream institutions of political journalism.
Creating a counter-institution is only one half of being avant-garde, however. The various manifestations of the artistic avant-garde also sought to relocate the primary purpose of art away from its aesthetic function. Again, we can find a clear analogy to the blogosphere. While it is generally understood that the purpose of established institutions of political journalism is primarily to inform (and, usually, to make a profit in so doing), political blogging strives to relocate the primary purpose of political and opinion journalism in agitation toward action. (166-167)
And this passage might also look familair:
To argue that blogs are either outlets for edgy and subversive content or dens of amoral, unaccountable journalism is to assume that the primary difference between bloggers and journalists is stylistic rather than purposive. Both critiques of blogs assume that bloggers are working primarily to achieve the same goals as journalists, which is to inform. Both critiques argue that what differentiates blogging from journalism is the bloggers' subversive style. However, considering just what stories have actually made blogs famous, I feel that it should be rather obvious that blogs are becoming famous not for their anti-establishment views or their amoral brand of journalism, but for justifiably claiming real political accomplishments. Conservative bloggers had helped turn the nationwide discussion of a story that was potentially damaging to President Bush into a story about how the media was being unfair to President Bush. Progressive bloggers had received significant mainstream media attention in late 2002 for helping to remove Trent Lott from his leadership position in the Senate over his specious remarks at the late Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. In 2003, bloggers were frequently covered by the press for assisting in the meteoric rise of Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Last year, I myself had begun to achieve a certain amount of notoriety for calling Gallup's methodology into question. More recent achievements of progressive blogs include outing Jeff Gannon as a pseudo-journalist within the White House Press gaggle, helping to elect Howard Dean chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and serving as Democratic Party whips during the Social Security debate. Every single time the mainstream media has paid significant attention to the activity of bloggers, it is not for the style and content of what we write, but instead for what we have helped to agitate or accomplish.
This is not a coincidence. Blogs have received the most attention from the mainstream media for their political accomplishments because the purpose of blogging is to bring about political change. Conversations on blogs are more akin to conversations at meetings for activist, political organizations than to conversations in coffee shops. This is the true way in which blogs are different from mainstream journalism. While traditionally journalists have worked to inform, bloggers strive to relocate the primary purpose of journalism in direct, partisan political action. Blogs are not just political journalism with a different style: they are political journalism with a different purpose. (169-170)
I still generally agree with this, but now, eight months later, I feel that it has lost much of its original power. Mind you, I don't think this is a bad thing. Instead, I think the reason the basic thesis of this passage has lost much of its force is that it has become much more accepted than it was in early 2005 (or before). I feel that there has been a large drop-off in complaints by the established news media that bloggers are not holding to traditional standards of journalism. Now, it seems as though it has finally sunk in to that bloggers are political actors and desire political results. They are not just journalists who want to become the next David Broder.
While I still generally agree with what I wrote, there are two smaller points where I now diverge from the thesis of the essay. In particular, I would no longer characterize bloggers as the journalistic avant-garde,
as I have been doing for some time. While I do believe that blogging has emerged as a new type of activity that blurs previously discrete forms of human activity together (journalism and political activism), I do not believe that, at least on the progressive side of blogging, that we are looking to transform the profession of journalism into something more akin to blogging. Progressive bloggers are not looking to lead journalists into a new era of activist journalism, but rather to make journalists do their professed task--reporting the news--better.
What I mean by this is that, ideally, political blogging and political journalism would still remain discrete activities and discrete professions. However, journalism, as a profession, would turn away from the subjective direction that it has taken over the past few decades in an attempt to accommodate conservative charges of "bias." Thus, whereas conservatives have a problem with the "mainstream media" because it does too much reporting and not enough subjective pontificating on behalf of conservatives, progressive bloggers have a problem with the "established news media" because it is no longer doing its job of reporting the news and separating truth from subjectivity. We do not want blogging to become the next "mainstream" in journalism, which would be the typical goal of an avant-garde movement. We also do not want to change the goal of established news outlets, as a typical avant-garde movement would, because we actually think their goals--to report the news and reduce subjectivity--are valid. We just want established news outlets to perform their jobs. We are definitely avant-garde in some ways, but I'm not sure if the analogy is as strong as I first believed it to be.
The second way I would diverge from what I wrote in the essay is not so much in repudiating anything I wrote, but instead is to wonder why, if the goal of blogging is to affect political change, we seemingly tend to lose more battles than we win. Among other things, why did we do so poorly on Alito? Why isn't the talking head circuit on Sunday talk shows and the cable nets getting any better? Why is a narrative / filter about Democrats being the equivalent of Osama Bin Laden still so easy for the right-wing to pas along into the established news media? Sure, we are having more successes, like
After Downing Street, Aravosis on Ford, and
Glenn Greenwald's remarkable new breaking story. Still,
as I pointed out in December, we really are just not breaking through on very large of a level. What's wrong?
At least in his "triangle" essays, Peter Daou seems to identify our lack of proper focus as the culprit.. From Peter's perspective, we are not properly focused on challenging the media and working to bring wayward Democrats into line (accomplishing both would be to "close" the triangle on any given story). I thinkt here is certainly some truth to this, but I also wonder how much of it is related to our own inability, as bloggers, to engage in more self-organization. We may spend a lot of time linking to one another, but we are always running forty campaigns at once. We may have conference calls sometimes, but how long do we really stay focused on any given topic? The blogosphere is truly chaotic, and seems to me to have a very short attention span.
I guess the question I am asking relates primarily to our independence that we so value. Yes, we are, generally speaking, free of the political and journalistic establishment, and yes the honesty and authenticity that comes with that independence can make us strong. However, if there is anything progressives should have learned a long time ago, it is that true political power comes from group action and from solidarity, not from a thousand different actors moving in a hundred different directions at once. If we truly want to affect political change, will it be necessary to, at least partially, leave the "golden era" of generally solitary, independent, diary-esque political blogging in the past? To what degree will we have to professional-ize political blogging in order to make political blogging more effective as a political force? And how would we even go about doing that if we decided it was valuable?
I can't say I know the answer to these vague questions, but I do know that I would like to make this the starting point of tonight's discussion. Why isn't progressive political blogging more effective? What larger role should political blogging have within a wider progressive movement, if any? Or am I wrong, and do others believe that it is already effective enough? I leave these questions to you.
