"The Blog Mob"

Someone in the MSM is unhappy with us, and that person is Joseph Rago at the Wall Street Journal. Referring to the “blogosphere” as the “Blob Mob” he admits “Blogs are very important these days.”

Then he rages: “The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. …Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.”

In the end he cries: “Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.”

To be sure, some of his criticism is true. Like a Palestinian with an AK-47 on full-auto his fusillade of accusations does hit a few targets.

“posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .”

Like all glittering generalities, there is both truth and falsity in this broadside. Many posts and replies are snide expressions of opinion, with little argument and a great deal of venom. Replies are often either a brief, sometimes obscene version of “you’re stupid,” or virtually endless essays often assembled as cut-and-paste jobs that assault reason like a bludgeon.

But I have found more humor, both broad and pointed in the internet than in the print media in the years I have been a member of the electronic community. You want irony? You want well reasoned analysis? Go to the Belmont Club if you want something deeper and more insightful than the retread sages of the beltway like David Broder and the members of the Journal’s Washington Bureau.

He complains that:

“The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element -- here's my opinion -- is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought -- instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.”

Is there anything more ironic than a member of the MSM arguing about a mob mentality? Where-oh-where is there a replay of ANY White House press briefing which most nearly resembles a feeding frenzy this side of a school of ravenous sharks? Why only yesterday the famously “independent” MSM was falling all over its shoe laces to be the first, second, third, whatever, to declare the violence in Iraq as a “civil war.” Depart from that orthodoxy and you will never get another column inch in “respectable” newsprint.

There is also the argument that precious little “new reporting” is being done by the blogosphere.
“Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage.”

This is an argument that assumes that blogs began as a substitute for newspapers. This is simply not true. Instead, many of the most influential sites on the internet – such as Drudge or Instapundit or FreeRepublic – bring together a veritable feast of traditional reportage from all over the globe. This is simply not possible due to space and/or time constraints in the old media.

But some bloggers like Bill Roggio, have packed their bags and become what the old media would recognize as “reporters.” And thanks to the internet, we are getting news from the front produced – not by the members of the press corps assembled on the bar stools and pool sides in Green Zone hotels – but by soldiers actually patrolling the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah.

But the most valuable service that the blogs have performed, and the elephant in the room that Joe Rago does his best to ignore, is that the blogs have done something that the MSM studiously avoids doing: investigating itself. The old MSM is a one-way communication media that, left to itself warps reality to its themes. Once Walter Cronkite said we lost Tet – even though we won that battle - objective reality bowed to media reality and the end of our attempt to keep part of Viet Nam free was in sight. The killing field of Cambodia, re-education camps and the boat people were simply collateral damage to the media’s war on the war.

Thanks to literally millions of people, operating like computers in parallel, The “Rather Papers” on Bush’s military career were exposed as fakes – something that would never have happened pre-web. The faked photographs from the Israel-Lebanon war were exposed by bloggers. The present question about the AP’s reporting of the “burning Mosques” and “Burning Iraqis” is being exposed as fake. There is now an entire industry devoted to exposing the old MSM as slipshod at best and liars at worst.

We now have two way communications. We are no longer at the mercy of editors who deign to print the occasional complaint. We do our own, and the old MSM is unhappy with its loss of total control over the way the issue is being framed. That is why Joe Rago is crying.