The New York Times Magazine needs to stop co-opting my Div III. Seriously.
On the whole, it was a good article for what it was. Of the three bloggers profiled in-depth, the only one that came off particularly positively was Josh Marshall. Strangely, though, after reading the article I couldn't seem to shake the nagging feeling that this could be a case of blogs jumping the shark.
A few thoughts:
I was rather shocked to see the piece being quoted approvingly on Daily Kos, given how the man himself comes off in the article:
When I reached the blogger section the next day, Moulitsas was still pumped up. ''Did you see my epic battle?'' he yelled over to me. Armstrong turned around, grinning his head off. ''The D.C.C.C. has never been challenged,'' Moulitsas said when I got over to his seat. ''It was a shot across the bow.'' ...Moulitsas said: ''I told him: 'Don't yell at me. The rules are changing. You gotta adapt. You gotta wake up and realize your role.''' (I talked to Bonham later, and he said he didn't get why Moulitsas thought the D.C.C.C. was slighting bloggers. After all, Bonham said, the D.C.C.C. had paid for the very top-drawer blogger bash where the fight broke out.)
Arrogant much?
Obviously Kos deserves a lot of credit for innovation and effectiveness in fundraising, but he's in danger of moving from occassionally shrill and smug to downright obnoxious. And while the recovering Green in me relishes any challenge to the party establishment, Kos frequently picks downright idiotic things to pick a fight over. The DNC cartoon brought up in the article is a case in point:
He told me the story of a flash advertisement that the D.N.C. had posted on its Web site. Moulitsas hated it. ''It was horrible, the worst thing I'd ever seen,'' he said. ''So I blogged a post saying, 'That's the biggest piece of garbage I've ever seen in my whole entire life''' (although he used stronger language than that). ''What the hell were they thinking?'' he asked. ''I was embarrassed to be a Democrat. ... I'm like, Here's the way it goes. O.K., from now on, keep this in mind: whenever you put up anything on this site, think, How are the blogs going to react?'' He was smiling, but all the veins were pulsing in his neck. ''You can pout all you want,'' he said, ''but I'm not here to make friends with you guys and go to your little cocktail parties. And that piece of garbage is going to lose us votes.''
A dorky flash cartoon on the DNC website?! Stop the presses! Storm the barricades!
Seriously, I remember the cartoon in question, and while it was amateurish and kind of stupid, it wasn't losing anybody any votes. Next time Kos is looking for an axe to grind with the party, try going after them for slavishly toeing the DLC/Wall Street line for over a decade and being left with no coherent message.
It's one thing to exalt bloggers for taking on the powers-that-be. It's another thing to decide that any time a big-name blogger throws a hissy fit, he's displaying great political intelligence.
I've never read Wonkette regularly, but I really think it's kind of a shame for her to get this much attention. Her blog contributes little or nothing to serious political debate or to online activism. What's even sadder, though not exactly her fault, is that her presence as the only woman amongst the A-list political bloggers only serves to further stereotypes of women as political lightweights.
So in some ways, I would've much rather seem a profile of someone like Zoe Vanderwolk, whose coverage of the Democratic convention for The Gadflyer was more insightful and original than anything I've read on Kos lately and who was only briefly mentioned in the article for her presence and clothing (her take is here, though she apparently misread "tank top" as "tube top").
The truly revolutionary thing about the blogosphere isn't a few rock stars talking trash and dishing gossip -- it's about literally millions of people finding a place for their own unique voice. True, most of those won't find a consistent audience far beyond immediate friends and family, but at least it's meaningful conversation, which is a more-than-welcome antidote to politics-through-television.
More later on Josh Marshall's relative humility and on Billmon's very important op-ed in the LA Times about the commercialization of the blogosphere.
UPDATE: David Weinberger, who literally wrote the book on the internet-as-conversation, has some thoughts on the article getting at a similar point.
Posted by Michael at September 27, 2004 03:51 AM | TrackBack