The Secret to the Success of Blogging
Press Action
Saturday, April 09, 2005
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/holmquist04092005/
By Micah Holmquist
The revolutionary greatness of blogs is impossible to overstate. Blogs, short for web logs, are a type of web page that has no similarity with any other type of web page, just as blogging is unlike any other form of writing.
If you are like me, you probably did not hear about blogs till very recently, but they have long been impacting the news we hear, read and see. Because of blogs, Mississippi Senator Trent Lott is no longer able to embarrass the Republican Party by speaking positively of the 1948 States Rights Democratic Party presidential campaign. Bloggers took down Dan Rather’s flawed 60 Minutes Wednesday report on documents purporting to relate to President George W. Bush’s National Guard service. The story was of great importance because Bush had no record as president upon which voters could evaluate him.
Even liberal bloggers have gotten in on the act. Recently they exposed Jeff Gannon, an irregular White House correspondent for talonnews.com, as being without the proper journalism experience needed to be able to ask questions of people in important positions. (OK there was something else about his sexual history, but that is not exactly important.) Gannon has since resigned so the president and his staff are once again free to ignore the occasional good question that properly credentialed journalists ask them.
The brilliance of bloggers, however, lies just as much in the stories they do not cover as in those they do. Bloggers, by which I mean bloggers that important pundits such as myself read, are not disturbed by the apparently For Show Only official announcement that Ibrahim al-Jaafari is the Prime Minister of Iraq.
The case of Terri Schiavo has not prompted bloggers to begin to discuss how much life is really valued in a world where millions die from hunger each year.
To their credit, bloggers aren’t interested malnourished Iraqis, either, at least not enough so that we will have to talk about it. And liberal bloggers like atrios and Josh Marshall are to be commended for having the good sense not to blog about the recent report on what went wrong with the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to be in Iraq, while the Daily Kos gang at least limits their criticism to things that can easily be disregarded as partisan bickering.
Perhaps most importantly, these cutting edge citizens’ media revolutionary journalists have not forced us to confront the non-sensical nature of the “war on terror" where the enemy is “the terrorists.”
Bloggers worth reading may sometimes cover stories that we do not, but they cover the type of stories we do and share our, obviously correct assumptions, that the United States of America is great, ideas are wrong if they are not popular and the “two party system” –- the system that Americans are over in Iraq, Afghanistan and all around the world defending—allows for robust political debate. They do not bother us with ideas that that we would not otherwise hear.
Hopefully bloggers will continue their good work. If not, we’ll have to take away those slots on Connected Coast to Coast and Inside Politics. After all, they don’t come for free.
Micah Holmquist, editor of Irregular Thoughts and Links, is a Cadillac, Mich.-based writer.