Please God, would someone – anyone – make the people with salaried journalism jobs stop trying to draw a line between what they do for publications that appear on paper and what people like me, working almost entirely on-line do? Will I – will any of us -- live long enough to see the silly caterwauling about subsidized punditry, fund-raising and partisan bickering die down to a dull roar? It's nothing more than a convenient disguise for salaried journalists to use to assure themselves that their station in life is secure from the rabble in its pajamas. It's short-sighted and silly. And everybody knows (or ought to know) it.
Well, after reading Garance Franke-Ruta's silly and not entirely accurate take-down of the rightwing blogosphere in The American Prospect it seems unlikely that I'll ever get my wish.
The same day that the White House Press office decides to give a day-pass to a writer from the on-line FishbowlDC, Franke-Ruta contemplates the bloggers, specifically the right wing of species, and finds them lacking. Big surprise. The American Prospect ain't exactly non-partisan. But that's not all that's going on with this story which – appearing on The Prospect's site on the World Wide Web begins, "During one especially hectic week in mid-February, the Internet took three scalps in what appeared to be unrelated events."
The Internet, as you know, changes everything. But I was not aware of the tomahawk capability. I gotta get me one of those. It could come in handy.
But back, sigh, to Franke-Ruta. Things get worse after that opening salvo. And fast.
“Are bloggers journalists?” is a question that’s been kicking around for a few years, and both bloggers and journalists answer it by saying no.
Not uniformly, they haven't. Just read Jeff Jarvis. Or Dan Gillmor. This would just be a rhetorical device if Franke-Ruta hadn't sat with me, The Nation's David Corn and Marc Cooper as we discussed – at her instigation – this very topic. Unlike Corn and Cooper, who have magazine affiliations, I am a stand alone journalist. I use blogging technology to publish my reporting and writing. Well, that whizzing noise you just heard was the sound of a good idea – one that might have made a pretty decent Prospect piece if I say so myself – sailing right past Franke-Ruta's head.
The distinction between technology and how its used is often lost in all this talk of who does what and how they do it. People who don't really understand this new world want to lump folks who use blogging software together. It's no different from saying that everyone who sits in front of a keyboard and types for a living must be, by definition, a secretary.
Now, maybe it's Franke-Ruta's editors who are the lame brains here. It's early days yet. The chaos and cacophony created by all these voices – many of them very angry voices – is hard to sort out. It's frightening, particularly if like many people in traditional, salaried journalism, you have spent your career banking on the idea that there's a nice safe hierarchy. That order is crumbling. And pretty much everyone – particularly those at the tippy-top of the pyramid – is unhappy about it.
But then there's Franke-Ruta's weird take on rightwing bloggers like the guys at RedState.
I'll leave aside her specific comments about PDF contributing editor Mike Krempasky and his jokes about "the dark side" for our editor Micah Sifry to address. Suffice it to say that when Krempasky stands next to Franke-Ruta, he offers plenty of evidence that today's conservatives are, indeed, wittier than Liberals.
Here, again, is Franke-Ruta:
But unlike traditional news outlets, right-wing blogs openly shill, fund raise, plot, and organize massive activist campaigns on behalf of partisan institutions and constituencies; they also increasingly provide cover for professional operatives to conduct traditional politics by other means -- including campaigning against the established media. And instead of taking these bloggers for the political activists they are, all too often the established press has accepted their claims of being a new form of journalism. This will have to change -- or it will prove serious journalism’s undoing.
How is this different from what's happening on the Left side of the self-styled blogosphere? Franke-Ruta doesn't say.
Her take on this whole matter is odd because she's trying to make a big deal about the fact that the Redstaters are 1) connected to a bunch of hardcore rightwing outfits; 2) they often work in concert with folks who share their views and, perhaps most importantly, they are 3) doing a better job of getting their message out than Democrats and lefties.
Um. Yeah. They are. And there are plenty of good reasons for it. One, they're smarter. Or at least they act smarter more regularly than their Lefty counterparts. Want proof?
Take Krempasky's decision to make Redstate.org into a 527 and to report its activities to the IRS Very smart if you understand the worry that many people – cynical reporters like me – have about politics, politicians and money. Or look at his attempt to get a conversation going here on PDF about what he was calling "open source oppo." How 'bout his observation that including bloggers in the Freedom of Information Act request exemption was a good thing for on-line journalism (It was a set-up with a Redstate.org co-founder but still, a good move). Or his warning that the Federal Elections Commission "hates freedom." Last week, Krempasky wrote to Markos Moulitsas and asked Daily Kos to join him in suing the FEC as way to cut off the commission's deliberations on how to regulate some kinds of on-line speech.
Good, smart moves based on savvy observations, all of them. Krempasky created RedState to go up against Daily Kos and he's done a damn good job of out-maneuvering the bigger, badder "progressive" storm troopers into a defensive posture on a host of issues. Now, that's a story. But Franke-Ruta instead turns her attention to the amazing but unstoppable non-story of the month, Jeff Gannon, the whorish nobody who somehow wormed his way into the White House briefing room. And who does she rely on for most of her observations about this bit of silliness? The folks at Daily Kos, the guys who claim both press and partisan exemptions from oversight and inquiry into what they're doing and how the manage their affairs. The folks who obviously want to have it both ways and who will face the toughest fight at the FEC because they are insisting on secrecy.
Franke-Ruta's conclusion? Right wing bloggers are "slime artists." Left wing bloggers are hard-working advocate-journalists. Why? Because Franke-Ruta and the gang at American Prospect have said so. Well, there are many pots and many kettles in this room. And they are all black.
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Great critique
Chris-- thank you for your sane analysis of this. I would add that article without exception referred to Republicans as "operatives" while a Democratic source was merely a "consultant" (that was the source "who attended the [CPAC] seminar incognito"... any hint as to who that might be ;-) Just one mention of Democratic congressional aides as "political operatives." Overall there still needs to be more solid research in this area, and very few are doing it.
I do have to give props to Franke-Ruta for getting SusanG's last name, I could not-- hey, she's the journalist here. But she missed the point of Stuck At the Gates: that the liberal bloggers missed the boat for almost an entire year on this story. It wasn't for lack of slimers. My best conclusion was that the technology wasn't there yet to make the magic meme explosion happen. Also, it's possibly true that more conservatives were primed to the narrative about the "elite/liberal/media" than liberals were primed about the "complacent/corporate/media". So it didn't take hold.
Also remember the schizophrenic nature of the Daily Kos. There really are two separate worlds-- Kos's and his diarists. The diarists did the research; Kos himself did know about it for two weeks until he read it on Atrios.