One, Two, Three, Four, What Are We Blogging For?

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I hope everyone will forgive another round of soul searching on the function of the blogosphere. When we last looked at the state of Presidential campaign blogging three weeks ago, we saw that both partisan and intra-party attacks generated significantly more coverage than any other news events. No speech or public statement by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John Edwards warranted as much attention as the David Geffen-induced spat between Clinton & Obama staffers, which the candidates largely ignored (except for Obama publicly chiding his campaign) or Amanda Marcotte's firing. Nothing any candidate said about Iraq, Iran, economic inequality, or health care mattered more than whether Joe Biden used the words "clean" and "articulate" in a situation where they might be construed as racially insensitive (and very little mention of Biden's civil rights record came up in these posts). And this was during a time when Obama made his first public statement supporting universal health care as a goal for the next presidential term, and Hillary's campaign events frequently featured voters asking her to apologize for voting for the Iraq war, or to say it was a mistake.

 

Today, the story is much the same. Ann Coulter's CPAC outburst against Edwards, followed by Edwards being the first to decline an invitation to Fox's debate, generated far more coverage than, say, his March 15th speech in Manchester—a speech that was a great return to '07 or '03 vintage Edwards, but generate no sizeable amount of coverage (Neil's valiant efforts notwithstanding). The end of the Fox News debate included a lengthy post by Markos himself (!!) which does nothing but declare campaign winners and losers. The only hard news event to generate a sizeable amount of coverage was the Al Gonzales meltdown, which let Clinton put her name in the paper alongside calls for his resignation.

It's possible that crude metric of "number of blog posts mentioning topic X" isn't a very good barometer of what's catching the interest of the blogosphere. After all, while Markos spent a whole post declaring winners and losers on the Fox News debate, he also pointed the 'sphere to articles to Clinton's non-apology on the Iraq war vote. But I am doubtful that that's the case.

From my vantage point, the DC pundit class has two major problems. First, it doesn't accurately reflect the spectrum of political beliefs of the public or even the two major parties (borderline crazies are overrepresented; serious advocates of single-payer health care are underrepresented). Second, the cable news networks and Sunday morning talk show guests too frequently allow what can best be described as gossip (or perhaps "Dimwittery"), usually but not always originating in bits of the Republican partisan machine (e.g. Drudge, the Catholic league, etc.), to hijack the news cycle. The blogosphere has done yeoman's work correcting the first problem, but now seems content to be part of existing political machinery rather than fix the second. That's ... dissapointing, since if the trend holds, it means the blogosphere will not put any competitive pressure on TV news to change its bad habits, leaving the vast majority of Americans who don't read political blogs with mostly the same quality of infotainment as they had before.

So, is this it? Is the blogosphere destined to widen the span of political professionals and quasi-professionals to balance conservative house organs, but fail to provide a new outlet for more hard news and less campaign/partisan fluff? I'd like to think it's possible to do both at the same time; am I being naive? Discuss.