There’s a story at Politics Daily, entitled, “Anti-Blogger Rhetoric: A Sign of What the Blogosphere Is Doing Right,” that sees opposition to blogging as a sign of blogging’s success.
Matt Lewis writes that
If success breeds contempt, then bloggers are finally making it big.
Consider this study in contrasts: During his first White House news conference last year, President Barack Obama called on a liberal blogger, Sam Stein, and CNN recently hired conservative blogger Erick Erickson to provide on-air commentary. On the other hand, despite such inroads, “bloggers” in general have increasingly become scapegoats and bogeymen for the mainstream press and politicians.
For example, while praising print media last year, Obama juxtaposed the traditional media with the New Media by voicing reservations about the ethics of blogging: “I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said.
I don’t think that being the criticism is usually proof of success, although it is evidence of notoriety. If one sees success as merely notoriety, then criticism is probably proof. This is a play on the old chestnut that “if one isn’t being criticized, then one’s not doing one’s job right.” I don’t believe that at all. Most jobs can be done well without any criticism at all. (It’s a chestnut Whitewater city manager Kevin Brunner once used.) Critical notoriety is proof of a kind of notoriety, and that’s all. It’s a measure of awareness, not skill or effectiveness.
President Obama is also wrong to think — very wrong, really — that blogging is somehow an introduction of opinion that didn’t exist with traditional media beforehand. (Walworth County Administrator David Bretl took a similar position in a recent community column. See, It seems like opinions get more ink, bigger play in today’s newspapers. Bretl, however, clearly understands America’s historical antecedents to blogging.)
On the contrary, blogging gets much of its impetus as a counterbalance to the bias and opinion of mainstream publicans that falsely contend they’re ‘objective,’ ‘unbiased,’ etc. Many papers shed their objectively long ago, and publish now as water-carriers for politicians and bureaucrats. That’s especially true in a place like Whitewater, where the Gazettes are the last real newspapers — as journalism — in the immediate area.
Blogging’s not really new. It’s just a new form of pamphleteering that was part of our earliest political tradition on this continent.
Good blogging on politics considers the public statements, documents, and actions of government, through its politicians, bureaucrats, and hovering special interests. That’s a job that newspapers were once proud to consider part of journalism, but a task that many have abandoned for fawning stories about public officials.
Bloggers are not reporters or journalists, and few would wish to be. I don’t think for a minute that I’m like a reporter, and I don’t aspire to that role, for example. Blogging is, in part, the restoration of lawful analysis and commentary that sycophantic newspapers, servile to public officials, no longer feel the need to offer. Whether that meets with approval or disapproval matters less than the simple exercise of a right, in fulfillment of a role, that’s traditionally, proudly American.