[lbo-talk] Blogosphere [was Re: Karl Rove Beats The Rap]

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Fri Jun 16 13:28:18 PDT 2006


At around 16/6/06 3:00 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Jun 16, 2006, at 1:55 PM, ravi wrote:
>
>> In the general (average) case, I think I would much rather take the
>> bloggers over the "MSM" any day.
>
> What would bloggers know if they hadn't read it in a newspaper (or, no
> doubt, a paper's website)? What news do bloggers actually gather? Do
> they travel, interview people, read anything longer than another blog
> entry?
>
> I guess it's like American Protestantism - anyone can join who claims to
> be saved. Who needs to know anything?
>

Starting at the end: you will agree, I am sure, that knowledge is a very different beast from news. On to bloggers. I must start with a confession: I used bloggers rather loosely to include anyone or organization whose primary presence is a web site and an RSS feed. Among those:

Where do Raw Story, Information Clearing House, Alter Net, Think Progress, etc get the bits that are not attributed to AP, Reuters, etc? IIRC, there are quite a few such.

Also, even from the MSM I don't really get that much news, really. Leaving out all the junk that I am uninterested in (ranging from cat rescues to Bush's latest pronouncements), yes, they do report on a few things that are of interest, such as the Scooter Libby indictment. But even there, there is probably some independent blogging outlet that carried such news too. Hell, just from the format of his site, one could call Matt Drudge the grandfather of blogging, and he used to be the best source to go to for everything from "breaking news" to election results.

Next point: I like Max Sawicky's (or D**2's) blog (if only MBS would use more meaningful titles!!) a lot more than say a Mandel BW column or NPR's Marketplace. For analysis, commentary and wit, the "blogosphere" is (for me) a lot more satisfying.

Final point: I think this thread was also about the effectiveness of the "blogosphere"? While I have as much issues as the next leftist with dKos, looking beyond him, I think they (the blogs) are significant, especially in terms of the future, and I think this is part of the scrambling and smearing that is going in response at WaPo and elsewhere.

Postscript: A blog (essentially a web site that uses a particular format, providing easy, dare I say egalitarian, access to both those who want to publish and those who want to subscribe) is best compared with MSM in terms of being a vehicle. A "blogger" in that sense could be considered part of that vehicle. What is to stop Alex Cockburn from stopping to publish in CounterPunch (or what have you) and instead start providing an RSS feed at counterpunch.org?

--ravi

-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list