Blogs and the Democratization of Hierarchical Institutions

The issue of blogs and blogging not being serious, or being dismissed by the grown-ups in the worlds of business and government, has been around for quite a while now.

It is of course to be expected that anything disruptive is met with resistance, and yes of course there are lots of blogs that have little or nothing to do with matters serious .. but for those who have been writing and reading blogs for a while now, I think it is a given that we understand there are blogs on many subjects where the authors and their commenters taken together do a very good job exposing and exploring serious issues.

Here's an excerpt from a serious USA political analysis blog, The Carpetbagger Report (Reality-Based Commentary, Analysis, and Tirades on Politics in America) ...

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about whether we’re in the midst of a sea-change when it comes to the role of blogs in driving the political discourse.

Granted, it’s been happening slowly for a while. The Plame scandal has always struck me as the first turning point. Between July 14, 2003 and September 26, 2003 — the 10 weeks between the original publication of Bob Novak’s now-infamous column to the day MSNBC first reported that the CIA has asked the Justice Department for a formal criminal investigation, blogs were the only sources of information about the controversy. In that time, the NYT ran just one news item on the story (on page A8). The WaPo ran five paragraphs on the story at the end of an unrelated article, which was published on A20. Over those same 10 weeks, progressive bloggers immediately realized the story’s significance and offered near-blanket coverage. Marshall, Yglesias, and Kleiman ran five posts each, Drum did nine, I wrote seven, etc.

When the story finally hit the front pages after the DoJ investigation started, Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote that reporters were caught flat-footed. An above-the-fold piece in the Post, Shafer said, sent “the rest of the press corps to the blogosphere…to catch up” on the details.

Shafer’s piece was lost in the shuffle, but that sentence struck me as quite an admission. Professional political reporters in DC, who are supposed to be covering stories like these, had no idea what was going on — so they had to rely on blogs. The major traditional news outlets had ignored the story; we didn’t. Bloggers frequently rely on traditional outlets for news coverage, but in this case, the tables were turned.

It was the start of a trend. Most notably, when it comes to the prosecutor purge scandal, it was Josh Marshall who connected the dots.

"In December, Josh Marshall, who owns and runs TPM, posted a short item linking to a news report in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about the firing of the U.S. attorney for that state. Marshall later followed up, adding that several U.S. attorneys were apparently being replaced and asked his 100,000 or so daily readers to write in if they knew anything about U.S. attorneys being fired in their areas."

For the two months that followed, Talking Points Memo and one of its sister sites, TPM Muckraker, accumulated evidence from around the country on who the axed prosecutors were, and why politics might be behind the firings. The cause was taken up among Democrats in Congress. One senior Justice Department official has resigned, and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales is now in the media crosshairs.

How significant is this shift?

And here are a couple of the comments following the blog posts cited above ...

It is the best thing to happen to democracy, as a whole, since 1789. Even if the big blogs sell out (I know, it could never happen), new ones will always arise. It’s enough to give a person hope.

Comment by Michael7843853 G-O/F in 08! — 3/18/2007 @ 9:46 am

Viewing blogs and MSM as adversaries is something I think we need to get past. No one can type enough keystrokes to stop what I think is the inevitable blurring of both Internet and traditional media. No one can say where it’ll lead but we do have some clues.

Using the Internet to facilitate collaborative reporting and investigation as recently demonstrated by Josh Marshall and TPMuckraker presents something new in the field of journalism. As other sites adopt similar models, one can imagine a potentially unlimited number of networks with ad hoc affiliates or stringers circling the globe. One can also imagine knowledgeable sources gathering around specific issues of interest and expertise. So, the professionalism, fact-checking and network direction roles of sites like TPMuckraker are going to become increasingly critical in establishing and maintaining credibility among potential audiences.

In the near-term, collaborative investigation by blogs will continue to explore issues that eventually percolate up to MSM for larger distribution, and MSM will come to rely on these ad hoc networks just as many blogs now rely on MSM for content.

In time, MSM will probably adopt the ad hoc network model for itself. Along the way, we’ll probably see the importance of MSM as we now know diminish, and new, solely Internet based players emerge.

So yes, we’re in the early stages of what will be a dramatic change.

Comment by beep52 — 3/18/2007 @ 10:24 am

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