Under The Radar
John at STF says something I think is very interesting about the role of the blogosphere and why the SCLM is so hostile to it:
Two things are happening here. First, there is no middle any more. This is mostly because the hard right is trying to take over the country by any means necessary, and destroying moderates (including Republican moderates) is part of their game. They have many plants in the media itself -- especially at the relatively-anonymous high levels, including ownership – and rightwing activists outside the media have learned that if they complain all the time about everything, often they’ll get their way. (This accounts for a supposed paradox: why do both liberals and conservatives hate the media? It’s because the conservatives are faking it. They know as well as liberals do that Dan Rather wasn’t really a liberal, but they can win by lying and smearing, so they do it.)
This has actually been well documented.
"William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America today, has come clean on this issue. "I admit it," he told a reporter. "The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.
There is no liberal media. There is a partisan Republican media and an establishment media and since the establishment is conservative there is only conservative media.
John continues:
The second thing is more positive. Faceless copyeditors and other behind-the-scenes pros try to control the spin of news by highlighting some stories, downplaying others, and hardening or softening the main point. Various tricks can be used to suppress a story: putting it on page 16 with a small, misleading headline and burying the point of the story in the 9th paragraph sum up the most common ones.
With the internet, this arbiter function is lost. Every man can be his own I.F. Stone now. Stone used to say that you could always find the truth in the newspapers, but it would often be in a short paragraph on page sixteen. Most of the damage that bloggers do to the established media doesn’t come from independent reporting, but from displacing the copy editors by highlighting stories the editors wanted to downplay.
This is quite correct, but it really only applies to our side. We on the left are sorting out the political spin and trying to get the establishment media to focus on issues and stories we think are important. And we don't get especially good results. Our success has been with grassroots organizing, not message pushing. This can be attributed to the political and media establishment's reluctance to deal with us (as we can see with the "liberal" media and the "liberal" academia represented at this conference.)We are out there, hundreds of thousand readers are reading us and yet we exist under the radar of all the liberal institutions while the right wing bloggers are "handled" by rightwing PR outfits and pushed into rightwing media and eventually into the mainstream.
On the right, the blogosphere has been incorporated into their message machine. (Indeed, the political blogosphere was really invented by a guy named Drudge, wasn't it?) They feed and are fed, without explicit direction. They know what they are supposed to say and it filters up down and around talk radio, cable news and into the mainstream. We all know how it works. This is why only a right wing freelance political blogger was invited to the conference --- the mainstream of both political parties are really only aware of the bloggers who have been pushed to the forefront by the Mighty Wurlitzer. Just as they are only aware of ... so many things that have been pushed to the forefront by the Mighty Wurlitzer. It's the essence of our political weakness.
Corrected to reflect John Emerson as the poster on STF.