I can honestly say that I have never, not even once, used the daily talking points any Democratic or progressive group has sent me. One time, I was even invited up to a meeting on Capitol Hill with some of the Democratic leadership as part of a messaging meeting with other "A-list" bloggers. We talked about the message we were supposed to help the leadership disseminate to the rest of the country, but I knew from the very start of the meeting that I just would never use the phrase "Together, America can do better," in my posts on MyDD, except to critique the message with the MyDD community.
I bring this up not to trash the entire notion of talking points, or to trash the national Democratic message. Relating to the former, I actually think talking points have their uses, and relating to the latter, the only major change I would make to the national Democratic slogan for 2006 would be "Together, all Americans can do better," instead of "Together, America can do better." I also do not write this as some form of self-congratulation for never using progressive talking points, or as some form of self-flagellation for not doing a better job of helping to reinforce the national Democratic message. Rather, I wish to discuss it as I think that there is a strong connection between the lack of blogger appearances in the MSM and the general incompatibility of typical messaging mechanisms, such as talking points, with blogging itself.
Simply put, I do not think that the type of messaging that works on radio and works on television does not work on blogs, and vice versa. Consider the case of talking points. Talking points are very useful for campaigns and organizations because they are a means of condensing a message into as short a time period as possible. This is particularly useful in an era when traditional news outlets spend less and less time covering political news, and when the average American spends less and less time thinking about politics. Constant repetition of a short, simple message is one of the last remaining avenues campaigns and organizations have to influence the public at large. It is thus also important for campaigns and organizations to test focus groups for the best possible message, since they have precious few opportunities to waste on ineffective talking points that will quickly vanish into the ether.
By contrast, blogging has absolutely no use for the repetition of talking points. Blogging succeeds largely due to bloggers being perceived as authentic voices that operate outside of existing political institutions. If a blogger were to simply repeat the same words coming out of the mouths of elected officials, no one would bother coming back to that blog. Further, as last year's Blogads readers survey showed, political blogs are read primarily by individuals who consume extraordinarily large amounts of news. People come to blogs because they want to go deep beneath the surface of politics. Thus, there is no need to condense a message for blog readers, because these are people who are willing to spend far more time and energy consuming politics than the average American. Still further, blogging has found a large audience primarily because it is not top-down, but instead is a wide diaspora of diverse voices, each of which are appealing for different reasons. If every blog were to repeat the same talking points, blog readership would dry up considerably, as the resulting lack of diversity would satisfy a much smaller number of people. Yet still further, most "A-list" blogs are extremely information heavy, with tens of thousands of words being written on them every day. A short sentence or two will be easily lost in the ocean of text that is the blogosphere. Online, you have to write a lot in order to be noticed--a couple of sentences based on talking points may work for a short segment on television, but it will quickly become lost in the ocean of text that is the blogosphere.
Of course, this street goes both ways. Blogging is ultimately too information heavy to translate well into those mediums. Among other sources, the Daily Show has parodied just how boring many of the attempted translations of blogging into cable news have been. Is reading aloud from a blog on television either interesting for television views or representative of what is actually going on in the blogosphere? Probably not. The blogosphere cannot be condensed into a medium like television that favors short segments. The structure of messaging on blogs is both different and incompatible with the structure of message on television or radio.
What I believe this means is that even if there is eventually an institution to cross promote bloggers in other medias, the success of bloggers in those medias will probably not have a direct relationship with their success in the blogosphere. Obviously, I would not necessarily have success as a radio commenter just because 20,000 people read MyDD every day. Duncan Black would not necessarily have success as a television commentator just because Eschaton is so wildly popular online. Bloggers have shown a tremendous ability to message for the highly politically active progressive class, an ability that has long since disappeared from the increasingly vacuous MSM. However, the same skills and characteristics that allow us to achieve a large readership among activists would be lost in the translation from blogs to other mediums. This is not to say that some bloggers would not have real cross-media success, but it is to say that even if they do, the way they succeed in other medias will not be the same way they succeed online.
Political blogging will undoubtedly continue to play a critical role in a multi-level progressive message apparatus, as it has proven to be the most successful medium progressives have found for communicating with their activist class in at least a generation. However, the potential of the blogosphere, and of individual bloggers, to become a wider populist phenomenon is probably more limited than I was willing to admit to myself at first. In many ways, we are limited by what makes us successful. On the one hand, our dedication to politics is simply too extreme for it to ever reach a wide audience outside of the activist class, but on the other hand it is exactly what the activist class had been seeking for some time. Considering this, the upward limit of our audience is probably around 6-8 million, which is a good estimate of the upward limit of the size of the progressive activist class. That is around three to four times the size of the current progressive political blogosphere, but still not enough to change conventional wisdom on its own. As Peter Daou famously noted, we will still need to work with, not just in, other institutions in order to achieve that goal.
Then again, 8 million people sounds like a pretty huge audience to me.
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