Go 'Blog' Yourself: Political Blogging Is Here to Stay

It was just last year, but already it seems sort of quaint that the role of bloggers in the body politic was being belittled by the mainstream media. In this presidential election, political blogs... at least the big ones attracting the most internet traffic... have played a huge part in how this presidential campaign has unfolded.

Some prominent MSM journalists back then were unsparing in their contempt of bloggers. Here's NBC anchor Brian Williams, in April of 2007:

"You're going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe. All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I'm up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx, who hasn't left the efficiency apartment in two years."

That's cold. And in February of last year, liberal author/blogger Glenn Greenwald wrote about comments by Newsweek White House correspondent Richard Wolffe. Greenwald writes that Wolffe claimed: "…blogs are engaged in a 'witch hunt' against the poor, besieged White House correspondents, which is terribly unfair because - and honestly, this is really an actual quote from Wolffe: 'the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general.'"

Like I said, that seems like longer ago than a year-and-a-half, because bloggers have seized a place in the media/political food chain, and they're not going to let it go. Specifically, I refer to the loss of the MSM's ability to determine the storyline of a presidential race. It used to be a campaign could spew its daily "message" to the ladies and gentlemen of the press, who would package it and send it out to readers and viewers, who wouldn't know any better that there might be OTHER storylines that were being ignored.

Enter the blogs. Suddenly a comment, an angle, or a development in a political story that the big media had chosen to ignore, gets picked up by the popular blogs. Unlike network newscasts or the big national newspapers, bloggers don't feel a need to move on to another story. With apologies to Sarah Palin, they grab onto under-the-radar news elements like pit bulls, and send them richocheting around the internet like so many digital pinballs Before long (or should I say, immediately) the cable news political shows pick up what's being blogged about, and that night it's the top story from Wolf Blitzer or Keith Olberman. At that point, it's become too big for The New York Times or ABC's "World News Tonight" to ignore, and the story ends up on page one, or the top of a network newscast.

I should add that a key development in the power of blogs is their ability to now display quality video, something that wasn't possible as recently as the 2004 presidential race. Controversial soundbites from rallies or interviews that might have been edited out of a network story; or where a politician completely contradicts what he or she said in a previous interview, get played, replayed, and emailed around the country on the blogs. It happened this week to Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachman, who said on MSNBC's "Hardball" that Barack Obama might hold anti-American views, and that the media should investigate members of Congress of find out if they're pro- or anti-America.

She probably shouldn't have said that. The pro-Obama blogosphere rose up as one to relay her comments across the internet. Short story even shorter: her democratic opponent has raised a million dollars since her comments, and her once safe seat is now in danger. Vinnie in the Bronx must be very proud.

I'm someone who's been trained in what I would call "classical" journalistic practices. But unlike the MSM critics, I think blogging is all for the good. To me, a simple rule of democracy is, the more voices the better. The ability of politicians to manipulate the media has been significantly reduced, simply because there are more people with the means to get their viewpoints out there, who don't really feel the need to play ball with these guys. Maybe an astute person wearing a bathrobe in his Bronx apartment actually has more perspective on certain matters than a Washington journalist who's having insider lunches with the "highly-placed officials." And now, especially with newspapers and magazines in a fight for their financial existence, bloggers have become an essential element in covering what Richard Wolffe called politics in general. Blog on, America!