Bloggers And Heathers Go 15 Rounds

I get the question a lot from people who share my ideological sympathies. Maybe you do, too. My wife and I, with but a tincture of mockery, summarize the question thus: "What is this thing called 'blog'?" It's intimidating for people who aren't familiar with the blogosphere but think they should be: a welter of new names, new concepts, new ways of evaluating quality. (Who to trust? Who to dismiss?)

Anyway, long story short, the blogger Digby's speech at the Take Back America conference [1] Tuesday night (video above) is where I'll be sending people asking that question from now on: everything you wanted to know about blogging but were afraid to ask. Why it matters, who are the players, what it means, how to read it - and, most fascinatingly, how to understand its often adversarial relationship to the "mainstream media."

These same questions, not coincidently, were the topic of one of the most impassioned panels at the conference, "Mainstream Media: Fair and Balanced?"

David Schuster of MSNBC told the audience of bloggers and blog-sympathizers: "You guys are winning. The mainstream media is losing our audience by the day." He got bemused applause.

A little later, he got a stark explanation as to why thrown back in his face. It came from Dan Froomkin, the blogger who, from his unlikely perch as a staffer at The Washington Post, brilliantly exposes mainstream media's errors and outrages every day. Big Media's losing its audience, he said, precisely because of the things bloggers say is wrong about it. Its obsession with providing "both sides" of a story, even if one of the sides is consciously lying, "crippled us very deeply." It's kept reporters -- many of whom, he said, who went into the business precisely to expose lies - "from reporting what we see. And calling it like we see it." No wonder the mainstream media is losing market share, said Froomkin: they suck.

He offered chapter and verse. The fact that over two-thirds of the public once believed Saddam was involved in 9/11 is "emblematic of our failure to speak truth to power." Why wasn't it a wakeup call for the entire press corps? Where was the soul-searching? The mainstream media covered "as if it's just another story and bored a nation into complacency. It's inexcusable." Listen to the bloggers, Froomkin advised his bosses. "I think it will help the bottom line."

Richard Wolffe of Newsweek said: right-O! We're already on it. "From a reporter's perspective," he insisted, "balance is not something you arrive at by positioning different voices around the page." Newsweek, he insists, really is fair and balanced: It tells the truth, and speaks that truth to power. He cited the cover story he co-wrote on the distortions of Colin Powell's presentation of the case to war at the United Nations.

Wolffe and David Schuster of MSNBC both defended Chris Matthews, criticized by the panel's opening speaker, blogger Duncan Black, for trivializing political coverage by, for example, his attention to Fred Thompson's musky, manly smell. He "cares more about politics--about real nitty-gritty politics--than anyone in Washington," Schuster said. He's "the reason" there was a debate in Washington on torture--a scary idea, if you think about it. It's not exactly something on which reporters should have to play follow the leader.

Wolffe thinks the liberal blogosphere saw a "conspiracy" on the right to seize the media discourse, accuracy be damned. That's true. He says liberal bloggers are "mimicking" the conservatives' strategy. They said, "Therefore, let's do it"--create a conspiracy "on the other side." The implication of what he was saying, as I saw it, was that liberal bloggers were willing to forego fairness and truth as fundamental values, in the interests of ideology. And I think that's wrong--the same kind of false equivalency that crippled mainstream reporting.

Judge for yourself. Check out the blogs Digby mentions in her speech. Tell me if you see a conspiracy to distort the truth for ideological reasons. Or, as I see it, a campaign to increase the amount of truth abroad in the land--of the sort the mainstream media would do well to emulate.

The q&a session illustrated the point. Someone asked the Washington reporters on the panel whether the sense in their newsrooms was that, as the International Atomic Energy Agency maintains, that Iran is nowhere close to having nuclear weapons, and may in fact not even be attempting to get nuclear weapons. Or did their newsrooms trust the administration, which makes the opposite claim?

Schuster affirmed that there was a "great deal of skepticism among reporters" on the administration's Iran claims. He puffed up a little with pride, and said that's why you don't see many reports on Iran these days, because they've evaluated the administration's claims and found them wanting--undeserving of attention.

Froomkin got the last word. He said: That's precisely the point. You don't respond to administration lies about Iran by not running Iran stories. You respond to it by doing stories--about adminstration lies about Iran.

Sometimes it takes a blogger to see what's in front of a mainstream reporter's face.