We have an interesting illustration of how the internet is changing the nature of political punditry, in the form of the ongoing spat between Joe Klein and the liberal blogosphere. Bloggy triumphalism can be tiresome, and the MainStream Media aren’t going to be replaced in the foreseeable future, if only because they actually put a great deal of effort and resources into real reportage. You know, calling people on the telephone, traveling to places where interesting things are happening, stuff like that. Annoying as they may be at times, the MSM are still the primary source for information about what is going on in the world.
When it comes to opinionmongering, though, we are faced with a completely different kettle of fish — ones with sharp teeth and short tempers. Journalism requires work, but anyone can have an opinion, and most everyone does. Not everyone has opinions that are interesting, or the ability to defend them persuasively using information and rational argument. That, in principle, is why we have pundits in the first place; they are supposed to be better-informed than average, and generally capable of intelligently articulating the opinions they have. The best pundits, presumably, should be those that have the most interesting opinions, and are the best at explaining and arguing for them.
Problem is, these are subjective criteria. What typically happens in the MSM is that, by some quite mysterious process, an editor or publisher decides that some particular person with opinions would make a good pundit, whether its because of the sparkle of their prose or the cut of their jib. A column or regular TV appearances are granted. And then, amazingly, they’re in forever. Rarely are columnists fired for not making sense; once they claim that status, they tend to keep it, no matter how pointless or uninformed their work turns out to be. It’s as if the NBA drafted players straight out of high school, but then they never had to play a game; they all just received long-term contracts, with salaries based on how good they look during lay-up drills and dunk contests. Maureen Dowd will be taking up space on the New York Times Op-Ed pages for decades to come.
Blogs work on a different model. Despite various well-documented biases and ossification of hierarchies, the blogosphere is still largely a meritocracy, in which success is driven by the free market of links. Say things that are interesting, well-informed, and thoughtfully presented, and someone will link to you. Word will spread, and you can be a success. Admittedly, you can also be a success by spouting complete nonsense, if you do it in a way that enough people approve of. The point is not that what rises to the top is exclusively meritorious; it’s that merit is one of the ways in which you really can rise to the top.
Joe Klein, longtime columnist for Time magazine and anonymous author of Primary Colors, is doing his best to inadvertently prove the dramatic superiority of the blog model for developing pundits. Klein has never been a favorite among lefty bloggers; although purportedly liberal himself, he comes off more as a smug apologist for accepted Washington consensus than as a shrewd analyst. On the Iraq war in particular, he’s shown something other than courage; in fact, what ever the opposite of courage is, he’s pretty much shown that. Now that the war has turned out to be a disaster on all fronts, he insists that he was against it all along. Which is funny because, in all of those columns he regularly penned for our largest-circulation newsweekly during the time when the wisdom of going to war was actually being debated, he forgot to mention it. He was asked about the issue point-blank at the time, by Tim Russert on Meet the Press, and replied “This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it–it’s–it–it probably is.” Somewhat short of a full-throated denunciation.
But what’s a little weak-kneed simpering among friends? You don’t have to go on the Sunday talk shows every week, and in a few months whatever you said at the time will be forgotten anyway. But now Klein has embarked on a new adventure — he’s blogging, as part of Time’s group effort called Swampland. We begin to perceive the outlines of an actual conversation; there are comments on his posts, and other bloggers can link to him and offer critiques (with explicit citations) practically in real time. And they’ve been calling Joe Klein on his crap. (Or, I should say, “calling him on his shit,” since one of the standard fallacies wielded against bloggers is that they shouldn’t be taken seriously because they use curse words.) It’s like all those young draft picks had to suddenly start playing games, and not against the Washington Generals, either.
The results haven’t been pretty. Atrios, in particular, has been tireless in combatting the idea that mainstream journalists are just liberal mouthpieces, and is quick to point out how often supposedly-liberal pundits like to carry water for Republicans. Most journalists probably do self-identify as liberals — but, much more relevantly, they are part of the professional political class. With a few notable exceptions, they tend to cozy up to power, and try their best to reflect the conventional wisdom of their friends in the same class. Smart political operatives have learned to play them like very loud fiddles, so that the desired message can be broadcast under the cover of neutral journalism.
Joe Klein is not pleased with how this conversation is going. He’s taken to frequent self-defensive meta-blogging, in which is primary concern is to defend his honor against the onslaught of the unwashed masses. The problem, not to put too fine a point on it, is that Joe Klein isn’t very good. He’s a fine wordsmith, but he’s not exceptionally smart, or analytic, or insightful. So he ends up lashing out, somewhat clumsily, at unnamed ideological extremists. The problem is that everyone knows he’s talking about Atrios, and everyone who can read knows that “ideological extremist” is a preposterously inaccurate label. Atrios, like Kos, is a partisan advocate, but both of them are unfailingly pragmatic in their goals. They are vociferous and combative, which polite liberals aren’t supposed to be, so their lazier critics prefer to write them off as blindly ideological. Atrios (whose real name is Duncan Black) couldn’t possibly be more sensibly center-left when it comes to actual policy prescriptions; the fact that he calls people “wankers” does not imply that he’s an organizer for the Socialist Worker’s Party. And anyone who has read Kos’s amusing takedown of Dennis Kucinich would be hard-pressed to describe him as a rabid leftist. These guys are devoted to the idea of getting Democrats elected, not promoting some sort of anarcho-communism.
Between the cozy covers of Time, you can let fly with the occasional unsupportable accusation without too much bother. But, this being the blogosphere, people called him out for not making sense. To which Klein, in an attempt to explain himself, responded with a list of things that make you a left-wing extremist. Suffice it to say, it is embarrassingly awful. A bizarre mixture of weird positions that none of his prominent critics actually holds (“believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world”), along with utterly irrelevant stylistic critiques (“regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives”). Compounding the supercilious vapidity with weaselly ambiguity, he mentions that such extremists will exhibit “many, but not necessarily all” of these attributes, and protests that it would be “wildly stupid” to actually mention the names of anyone who might fit these characterizations. I’m pretty sure I remember these rhetorical strategies, from back in junior high.
In response to which, the blogosphere being what it is, much smarter people smack him down. Ezra Klein (no relation) and Scott Lemieux do the necessary dirty work, dissecting the fundamental dishonesty behind Joe Klein’s smears. All of which (this whole bloated post, really) is to say: wouldn’t the world be a much better place if Ezra Klein and Scott Lemieux were regular columnists in our major media outlets, instead of the people who are actually there? In the heated crucible of blogospheric debates, interesting and intelligent voices can percolate to the top, who might never have been heard if things were left to the whim of a small coterie of editors. Why not take advantage? How great would it be to see Shakespeare’s Sister and hilzoy on the pages of the New York Times, instead of Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich? We’re replacing “liberals” with liberals here, in the interests of ideological balance, but the same goes for conservatives. Orin Kerr and Tyler Cowen in place of George Will and David Brooks? One could go on.
The dearth of intelligent commentary and insightful analysis in the punditosphere as currently constituted is a contingent condition, not a necessary fact of life. There are really smart people out there who are doing a better job for free than that for which the professionals are handsomely compensated. Sadly, a lot more people are still getting their opinions from the MSM than from intelligent blogs. (And, to state the obvious, there are plenty of non-intelligent blogs.) But someday soon, I have to think, some forward-thinking editors and TV news-show directors are going to start taking advantage of the wealth of talent that is sitting there before them. Of course, they have to have the wit and discernment to recognize a good thing. To date, the highest-profile example of a blogger becoming a major columnist is Ana Marie Cox, the erstwhile Wonkette who has now joined Joe Klein at Time. Which is fine, except that Cox is a comedian, not a political analyst. Her success is a paradigmatic example of the idea that what matters is the cleverness with which you can turn a phrase, not the actual substance of what you have to say.
That’s old-school thinking. Here’s hoping that, amidst the sound and fury, the best of the blogosphere can help to elevate the discourse above what we’re used to.
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Sean, you raise a very important point, which is MSM’s attempt to cross over to something more like blogging, but more in name than in substance. And speaking of which, did you see USA Today’s site redesign?
http://www.usatoday.com/
Basically they are trying what I guess you would call a whole “Web 2.0” interactive approach, with commenting, and what looks like a Digg-type functionality.
Your post makes an important distinction between opinion/editorials, and ‘news’. I think you put it quite succinctly when you said, “Not everyone has opinions that are interesting, or the ability to defend them persuasively using information and rational argument.”
With redesigns like USA Today becoming increasingly common, be it something genuine or just an attempt to cash in on interactivity, I have to ask myself, is this really a good thing? On the one hand, it can really cut the crap for exactly the reasons you mentioned. On the other hand, does every article on earth really need a peanut gallery? Our local paper recently did a similar renovation, this MSM/blogosphere crossover type attempt, and overall I think it has stifled interaction and not improved it. There are the same 20 blowhards who have to comment on every article, leaving the rest of us to roll our eyes and not bother sticking our necks out.
Maybe the happy medium would be pundits chosen from the blogger meritocracy, as you put it, while the actual news and in-depth pieces are still more traditional MSM without the peanut gallery. In that sense the Guardian in the UK and a few other papers have struck a decent enough balance.
It is probably true that it would be nice to have a better set of columnists, but what is to say that they would not turn into the same people being reviled? I think it is not so much smarts as the fact that being a mainstream columnist in the establishment brings with it certain pressures and changes which few (in my opinion) have easy immunity against. The one notable counterexample is Paul Krugman, and he does not have to keep anyone happy or comfortable and is in a pretty untouchable position himself, hence he can say what he thinks without worrying too much about how this plays with others in the “establishment”. The fact is that it pays off very well for gents like Tim Russert and Joe Klein to be cozy with the establishment and not be completely honest on important issues.
oops, the previous post above this was mine (and not the first chemist_here). sorry.
Just a brief word from those of us who really are anarcho-commie /radical /eco-terrorist / extremist freaks. We too are being mischaracterized and castigated by these forms of mediocre discourse in the MSM. In terms of actual numbers we are a miniscule population (most of the academic members of the set pretty much all know one another–most of the radical enviro-activists likewise all know one another), yet we are constantly referenced as some all-encompassing symbol of all that is evil on the left. Few, even on the left, actually have any idea of the philosophical principles and ideas that inform our thoughts and actions. How many of you have read Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire? How many have read any of the publications of Crimethinc, or RSS feed “Watching America”? It is easy to lump the far left, the radical left, into one big soup pot of craziness. Joe Klein does so without one single neural connection based in reality or fact. We, more than any other leftist group marked along the spectrum of all that is left of the mythical (much too far to the right) center, criticize and rebuke those with us whose actions and deeds have damaged our efforts to reshape the future of a better, healthier, sustainable planet. Yet we continue to be the “enemy” for everyone to our immediate and even relatively proximal, right.
And yes, unless you read blogs and papers in Dutch, German, and Danish, you really would have no idea behind what is happening in Denmark. The usual MSM noise completely overshadows and hides the ongoing philosophical debates.
‘Annoying as they may be at times, the MSM are still the primary source for information about what is going on in the world.’
As far as the MSTVM news go, you will not learn what goes on in the world. CNN should be ashamed of calling it ‘a 24hours news station’. They repeat ad nausium the same domestic news, but hardly a single in depth reporting of foreign news. Why wouldn’t they allocate Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, etc. hours with original feeds from various countries with subtitles or translations? The US-centric-ness of the TV news is vexing to say the least.
It always seems odd to me that the majority of guest commentaters are folks from private research institutes possibly with partizan views or corporate affiliations, rather than university professors who may have more independent views and expertise.
In any event it is encouraging that MSM is finally turning toward blogosphere for some fresh inputs. Whether the impacts will be reflected in their news pieces may depend more on other dynamics.
Sean,
You stated the main problem with using these guys as columnists here:
“These guys are devoted to the idea of getting Democrats elected”
Only the choir wants to listen to a preacher, and the traditional media likes to at least maintain the sembalance of independence. I stopped reading Paul Krugman long before I stopped reading Maureen Dowd for this very reason.
In fact, the general form of the activist/ propagandist promoter is indistinguishable from that of the pseudoscientist. Formulate an unmoving position, then beg, borrow, or fake evidence to support that position. I don’t see how supporting or encouraging this type of though process anywhere makes science education any easier.
Recent PBS/Frontline show (a source of REAL journalism, btw) on “News”:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/
They talk about how MSM is junk putting out “junk”, the impact of blogosphere (“citizen journalism”). Real journalism is replaced by sensationalism to get ratings, which is the basis for advertising dollars.
“Junk Food society” goes beyond the news arena, it exists in Academia as well: Junk Research. “Quality of proposed research project take a back seat to how much MONEY the research project brings in”. Many universities (Stanford especially), preach to the Almighty Dollar.
From your keyboard to the fates’ ears, darling! 😉
Lab Lemming on Mar 5th, 2007 at 3:56 am
“Sean,
You stated the main problem with using these guys as columnists here:
“These guys are devoted to the idea of getting Democrats elected”
Only the choir wants to listen to a preacher, and the traditional media likes to at least maintain the sembalance of independence. I stopped reading Paul Krugman long before I stopped reading Maureen Dowd for this very reason. ”
If the MSM columnists were devoted to getting Democrats elected, then they’ve chosen a stranged way of doing i t- bashing Clinton for 8 years, bashing Gore, and favoring Bush. Even now, they follow public opinion, as the administration sinks.
As for Krugman vs Dowd, whose columns have aged better? Krugman was telling the truth when Dowd was cattily discussing Gore’s clothing.
Amusingly understated.
Frank Rich at the NYT is pretty good (one among the (diminishing) reasons as to why I subscribe to the newspaper) and I wouldn’t want him replaced.
Even with an influx of talented pundits, the state of the ordinary MSM would not necessarily change. If given a large contract up front, even talented writers might lose motivation.
A modification of the contract structure of op-ed writers, etc., however, would have a significant effect on MSMs. If writers were no longer blindly guaranteed many years and dollars, there would suddenly be room for hiring multiple talented bloggers (and if the bloggers fail to live up to their potential, they would lose a job as well). Essentially, the media would be wise to follow the model of professional sports.
I’ve no idea how I feel about this piece, Sean.
But it does remind me that I miss Molly Ivins.
The MSM folks have pints of hard liquor in their desk drawers, and are pissed that these wine sipping web interlopers are taking their eyeballs.
Barry,
I quoted Sean’s mention of the Democratic party as an example of partisanship, not as an example of liberal favoratism. As an anti-partisan, I don’t care which side the shills spin for. My point is that partisanship is boring and antithetical to scientific communication. As for the ability of newspaper columns to age, that is primarily determined by the type of fish that they wrap.
Excellent post, but what’s wrong with Frank Rich? Maybe you meant to say “Tom Friedman”, which would make more sense.
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Lab Lemming wrote:
You stated the main problem with using these guys as columnists here:
“These guys are devoted to the idea of getting Democrats elected”
Only the choir wants to listen to a preacher, and the traditional media likes to at least maintain the sembalance of independence.
and Barry responded:
If the MSM columnists were devoted to getting Democrats elected, then they’ve chosen a stranged way of doing i t- bashing Clinton for 8 years, bashing Gore, and favoring Bush. Even now, they follow public opinion, as the administration sinks.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but when Lab Lemming referred to the problem with using “these guys” as columnists, wasn’t he/she referring to bloggers like Atrios and Kos, not to MSM columnists? The thing about being devoted to getting Democrats elected was presumably a reference to Sean’s earlier comment about Atrios and Kos:
And anyone who has read Kos’s amusing takedown of Dennis Kucinich would be hard-pressed to describe him as a rabid leftist. These guys are devoted to the idea of getting Democrats elected, not promoting some sort of anarcho-communism.
A marginally-careful reading of what I actually wrote would reveal that the “these guys” who are interested in getting Democrats elected were not the same people I suggested would make good columnists.
I think you have not given bloggers sufficient credit – they can and do exceed the conventional press. Do not take my word for it, however, here is a quote taken from the Daily Kos pertaining to blog coverage of the Libby trial: ” … former chair of the NYU journalism program) Jay Rosen marvels at their accomplishment, and says their coverage bested the traditional media’s efforts.”
Followed by his actual comments: ” FDL had more people on the story (six contributors, all housed together). They cared more about documenting every turn. They knew more about the case because they had been writing about it for longer, and they didn’t want to disappoint their supporters.
But wait a minute: bloggers do views, not news, right? They’re like a giant op-ed page, but without decorum. Bloggers are parasitic on reporting that originates elsewhere. Bloggers have an ax to grind, so their reports aren’t going to be reliable. Besides, bloggers don’t do reporting, really. Their trade is opinion (“…and don’t get me wrong, I think that’s great.”) These ideas are “fixed” points for a lot of journalists. And the example of Firedoglake at the Libby trial disconfirms them all.
It was the most basic kind of journalism imaginable. You’re my eyes and ears, Christy. Tell me what happened today. When it came time to interpret, to get inside the heads of the key actors, they rose to that challenge too. (Here’s video of FDL’s Jane Hamsher, Christy Hardin Smith and Marcy Wheeler after closing arguments.) […]
[Marcy’s] Anatomy of Deceit was the best primer available for the trial, in my opinion […]
“Even as they exploit the newest technologies, the Libby trial bloggers are a throwback to a journalistic style of decades ago, when many reporters made no pretense of political neutrality,” wrote Scott Shane in a New York Times feature (Feb. 15). “Compared with the sober, neutral drudges of the establishment press, the bloggers are class clowns and crusaders, satirists and scolds.”
True, and this is part of their appeal. They also recorded more of the event in “just the facts” style than the neutrals in the establishment press. So who’s the drudge of what is news? I’m just advising Newsroom Joe and Jill: make room for FDL in your own ideas about what’s coming on, news-wise. Don’t let your own formula (blog=opinion) fake you out. A conspiracy of the like minded to find out what happened when the national news media isn’t inclined to tell us might be way more practical than you think.”
Here is the link so that you can read it yourself: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/3/12/13111/5666
Bloggers have covered stories well in advance of the regular press and in too many cases did it better, despite their lack of resources. Pretty sad state.