Definitions change over time.
..we are the Blog....resistance is futile..
Posted on 02/21/2006 2:50:31 PM PST by Congressman Billybob
The title of this column is one of my favorite lines from William Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury. It is also a precise description of what is wrong with the American press, as two examples from the past week demonstrate. One concerns the blogosphere. The other concerns the nearly universal incompetence of the press in reporting on “the” Danish cartoons that are “causing” the Muslim riots.
Faulkner’s character, Quentin Compson, on the day of his suicide at Harvard, reflects on his sister’s long-lost virginity with these words, “which, being believed, was, whether it was or not.” The first example of the American press presenting lies as truth, and apparently believing them, is in New York magazine on 20 February. The lead article is entitled, “The Blog Establishment: the Emerging Hierarchy of the New New Media.” It includes a sidebar on “the 50 most popular blogs.”
It does not come within even spitting distance of the truth of its subject. Yet readers of that magazine may be deceived into thinking they’ve received knowledge on this cutting edge subject, because the article is so long, and studded with so many details. The readers may lap this up with a spoon. The editor who commissioned it may be blissfully unaware of how threadbare the article really is. But its author, Clive Thompson, cannot believe it is true. Allow me to marshal the evidence.
Two self-referential comments in the article make it clear that Mr. Thompson is firmly on the left of the blogosphere. But he has to know, from traffic counts on blogs and from repeated demographic studies of heavy Internet users, that the left is the small side of the blogosphere. He has written what the editor wanted, and told the readers of this incestuous magazine what they want to hear. I’m reminded of the New York columnist who said after Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern for President, “I don’t know how Nixon was elected. No one I know voted for him.”
In an article which pretends to be a survey of an entire subject, any reporter should bend over backwards to include and correctly describe the players and organizations which are on the opposite side of the political fence. Mr. Thompson has utterly failed in that task.
He uses “links from other blogs” to establish his hierarchy of the “A-list blogs.” Using this as the yardstick, rather than total traffic, or “stickiness,” distorts the results. “Stickiness” measures how much time the average user spends in a session on any blog. Obviously, far more information is conveyed, and the impact is greater, if the users stay on for two hours, rather than ten minutes.
The article highly touts the Daily Kos by Marcos Zuniga, which it ranks No. 4. It does not mention that this blog is on the hard left, so much so that John Kerry (he ran for President, it was in all the papers) has ceased contributing to it, in order to protect his image. On the other hand, the author ranks two blogs that far outrank the Daily Kos in their influence, as Nos. 37 and 42. He respectively describes Power Line as “a conservative political blog by three lawyers,” and Little Green Footballs as “a rabidly conservative war blog.”
Those experienced with the entire blogosphere know that Daily Kos deals mostly in political opinions, which cannot be verified. Power Line and LGF deal in facts, which their readers are invited to verify and confirm or falsify. The article credits Power Line for “helping to prove that the docs used by CBS” on the George Bush military record story “are fakes.” But there is no mention in the article whatsoever of the very powerful blog, FreeRepublic.com, which first broke that story.
That website also led the charge that got Eason Jordan fired at head of CNN. And among its details, its readers know that the Shuttle Challenger was burning up in the atmosphere and trailing debris as it crossed the coast of California, while the mainstream media were still sitting on their heels, waiting for NASA to announce the landing. All it took was a decent refracting telescope, aimed at the right point, waiting for the Shuttle to pass. It’s called research. The results are called facts.
The biggest error, though, was missing the tipping point in the power of the blogosphere. The timeline with the article does not even mention the date when the New Media bagged its first, aging elephant from the Old Media, the downfall of Dan Rather. That’s when the Old Media lost its monopoly on major stories. Although Walter Cronkite is still alive, breathing and writing, no longer can any of the aging elephants say, “And that’s the way it was,” without looking over their shoulders at the New Media.
Second case in point is the rioting “caused” by the “Danish cartoons.” Ten days ago, an obscure website published the English translations of Danish documents, which told the truth. The Danish Imam who traveled to the Middle East to peddle his poisonous wares, added two “cartoons” to the Danish ones. One showed a praying Muslim receiving carnal attention from a dog. Another was made from a costume contest in France where a man dressed as a pig with a snout on his nose. Apparently, the latter image reminded the Danish Imam of the Prophet Mohammed (peace be unto him, but only to the extent that his followers deserve it).
Since a pig snout reminds that Imam, who was featured on 60 Minutes on Sunday, to think of the Prophet, perhaps his rabid followers ought to pay a visit to his home in Denmark and inquire into the matter.
The only MSM article I’ve seen on this underlying truth of the Muslim riots was an article on Fox News last week by Tony Snow. The rest of the MSM have totally ignored this essential information, available in the blogosphere. The truth is that most of the Muslim leaders are barbarians, and most of their active followers are fools. But it takes facts to reach that conclusion. And hard, cold facts – though it takes some digging to find them – are much more the province of the New Media than the Old.
Here’s a suggestion for the American press. These words of Faulkner should be carved in wood above the podium at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., as a reminder that when almost all of the press universally report a fact as true, it may nonetheless be a lie:
“Which, being believed, was, whether it was or not....”
About the Author: John Armor is candidate for Congress in the 11th District of North Carolina. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
John / Billybob
rest of the MSM have totally ignored this essential information, available in the blogosphere.
Trudy Rubin at the Philly Inquirer did write a very good column on the cartoon subject that mentioned the bogus cartoons. But she's about the only one I've seen in the MSM that did so.
A blog is an online diary, with the express purpose of displaying the entries of a single author.
A forum, on the other hand, is specifically for posting from multiple users, organized by a thread topic, and encouraging discussion.
The two terms are misused enough that their meanings are pretty blurry to most. But there is a difference.
Great essay. Good lead-in.
I LOVE it. A home run Congressman.
Better to be overlooked, to be underestimated. These games aren't being played by the amateurs who attempt to chronicle them, and the results are for keeps.
I thought you had decided not to run.
I just thought it bore repeating.
And, as far as FR is concerned, it is a blog. Its my blog.
cheers
misunderestimated..heh heh. ;^)
FR is not a blog, and predates blogs by a decade. It's something else. An information exchange? Blogs have one or several authors, whose personality and indosyncratic opinions tend to drive the content of the blog. FR has tens or hundreds of thousands of authors. Blogs usally have at most one or two postings a day. FR has thousands.
I don't think leaving FR out of the blogoshphere review is wrong, unless the DUmmies are there.
Even then Dummie Underground and Free Republic are not blogs, IMHO.
“Which, being believed, was, whether it was or not....”
Not only do they know this, John, they depend on it.
Thanks for writing and posting this essay. Just a small correction: you meant Columbia (which disintegrated February 1, 2003), not Challenger (which disintegrated January 28, 1986)
Definitions change over time.
..we are the Blog....resistance is futile..
John, this isn't the word you want in an otherwise excellent column. "Falsify" means to make a forgery, to make falese records.
What you want to say is that readers are invited to disprove.
I looked forward to this article when I saw it on the cover of New York last week, as I took it out of the mailbox. Finally got around to it reading it last night while taking a bath. Wow, was I disappointed.....not just because of the obvious bias, but somehow because at the end I felt I knew less than I knew before. Maybe someone should introduce him to PEACE MOONBEAM,and countless other blogs that I have been referred to here on the endlessly proliferating pages of FR.
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