Blogstorm troopers. Last year, before my extended hiatus, I spent a fair amount of time reading Jay Rosen's PressThink: Jay himself, though often in need of an editor, was a valuable, rumantive voice about the intersection of journalism and blogging, and the conversations he started were unusually thoughtful and wide-ranging. Since taking up this blog again, I've looked in on PressThink much less: so take this with a grain of salt. But my impression is that Rosen has slipped into the same fundamentally uncritical infatuation with the supposed "revolutionary" potential of blogging vis a vis mainstream journalism that people like Jeff Jarvis and Hugh Hewitt trumpet so relentlessly. And it's had a bad effect on the tone and approach of the PressThink project.

Palling around with the likes of Jarvis and Hewitt can't, on the face of it, be good for anybody. It's with serious disappointment that I note, as of this writing, that the last three entries at PressThink are taken up with the Eason Jordan flap (see below), which has been Hewitt's hobbyhorse for the last couple of weeks now. I don't remotely think that Rosen has the same kind of poisonous ideological agenda as Hewitt or Jarvis, by any means: but though he insists on reserving judgement, Rosen (whose first post on the matter was occasioned by his appearing on Hewitt's radio show to discuss it) is essentially acting as an enabler of that agenda in giving the issue such sustained and exclusive attention.

It's a prime example of how, even for somebody basically of good will like Jay Rosen, there's a drastic loss of perspective once you decide that virtually any blogger interventions that appear to upset the big-media apple cart are to be celebrated. The Jordan thing is obviously driven by the desire of the "support-the-troops" right to inflict another blow on CNN and make sure they stay in line (though by now it's hard to see how anybody on the right could question their loyalty), laughably so: but Rosen seems unable to see it.

Not all blogstorms are created equal. ("Blogstorm" appears to be Hewitt's preferred term for the descent of the Web wolfpack: has a nice Third-Reichish ring to it, don't you think? Ed. note: The attribution of "blogstorm" to Hugh Hewitt is in error. Correction is posted here.) We now have three ready-to-hand examples of the phenomenon, all widely celebrated on the right: Rathergate, the Ward Churchill mess, and now Eason Jordan. (No, Churchill isn't a media personality, but otherwise the modus is the same.) In each of these cases, the citizen bloggers, while clothing themselves in the mantle of truth-seeking, are really and entirely engaged in enforcing ideological conformity.

How many of these campaigns are we going to see before people get wise? The blogspace turns out to be an extraordinarily powerful site for coordinating opinion, and for driving action: but it matters a great deal what opinions are being coordinated, and what actions driven toward. When your population of bloggers is strongly oriented, by temperament and training, to finding enemies under the bed and conducting witch hunts, then your "citizen journalism" quickly veers from being a tool of citizenship to a tool of political control.

Rathergate, in particular, stinks of Karl Rove from start to finish. The rest appear to be exercises in keeping the machine oiled and in good order. All such things take is a light push on the appropriate levers, and a blog system with a few ready outlets to the institutional media (an ever wider pipeline, by the way, as big media are trained to fear the "power of the blogs"), and boom! another blogstorm coalesces. These really aren't much different from the Astroturf tactics the GOP/corporate PR axis has specialized in for years: they're only more virulent, and the goal is different, namely to suppress any appearance of ideological incorrectness in the mainstream media. (A remarkable feature of the Eason Jordan tempest is that nobody that I can see has even suggested that Jordan's opinions can be shown to have had any effect on CNN's coverage of Iraq. His having an opinion, in itself, is the beginning and end of the thing.) And we are left with a right-wing "citizen" blogspace happily and entirely assimilated to the propaganda direction of the Republican party. And unlike Armstrong Williams, these guys will do it for free.

posted by michael  9:50:09 AM  
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