Online Elites
Over at HFA, Ryan and Megan are arguing that elites are starting to dominate the online world, which undercuts our argument that the Internet promotes democracy. I'll take each of their posts separately.
Ryan argues that there is an elite class within the blogosphere:
As usual, Ryan makes some good points. Armstrong and Moulitsas have been very influential, and Daily Kos is now the undisputed leader of the liberal blogosphere. Indeed, the list of major blogs in 2006 resembles the list in 2003--with Daily Kos, Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Atrios' Eschaton, and Talking Points Memo still near the top of the list. But these sites gained popularity not because a corporation promoted them, but because people were drawn to what they were saying. Moulitsas and Armstrong had no power in politics before they began blogging. Matt Soller's history describes their sites as "what two political amateurs started as a hobby." Only after they had established themselves did they begin to help the Dean and Clark campaigns. I view this as the success of bloggers in a meritocracy, not the creation of a permanent elite.
Megan responds to an earlier post of mine regarding the Trent Lott affair:
I think Megan is correct that mainstream news outlets continue to dominate Internet news. Part of the reason for this is that newspapers have budgets large enough to send reporters to cover events and conduct investigations. Bloggers meet a different need--to cover stories that are being ignored by the mainstream media (e.g. Trent Lott, the Killian memos, and the early Dean campaign itself), and to collect information from a broader base of sources than any single reporter can access. I don't think that mainstream media will be overtaken by blogs anytime soon. But blogs will continue to be an influential supplement to mainstream media, correcting its errors and picking up the stories it misses. Nothing like this existed before the online era. At best, people could try to write letters to the editor, organize public protests, or hand out pamphlets if they felt that the news that matters to them was being ignored. Now they can gain a worldwide audience from their living rooms.
Ryan argues that there is an elite class within the blogosphere:
Certainly blogs and podcasts are more democratic and open than TV or radio, which cost an arm and a leg. But even in the blogosphere we have an elite class emerging. Matt Stoller gives a great history of the beginnings of the 2004 campaign blogging. Reading it, you see two names repeat: Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Dailykos.com. "kos" started draftclark.com and helped Armstrong redesign MyDD.com; Armstrong in turn was pushing Trippi to use Meetup.
As usual, Ryan makes some good points. Armstrong and Moulitsas have been very influential, and Daily Kos is now the undisputed leader of the liberal blogosphere. Indeed, the list of major blogs in 2006 resembles the list in 2003--with Daily Kos, Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Atrios' Eschaton, and Talking Points Memo still near the top of the list. But these sites gained popularity not because a corporation promoted them, but because people were drawn to what they were saying. Moulitsas and Armstrong had no power in politics before they began blogging. Matt Soller's history describes their sites as "what two political amateurs started as a hobby." Only after they had established themselves did they begin to help the Dean and Clark campaigns. I view this as the success of bloggers in a meritocracy, not the creation of a permanent elite.
Megan responds to an earlier post of mine regarding the Trent Lott affair:
The Trent Lott story of information flow from the blogosphere to mainstream media is clearly the exception, not the rule. TforA concludes by commenting, "The Lott affair showed that a few individuals--mostly outsiders with no budgets--could kick the national media into action and shake up the U.S. government." But the "outsiders" were already part of the blogosphere elite! And their power to "kick the national media into action" is overstated by TforA: Traditional news sources still dominate internet news while blogs function as the backwater, out of which occasionally comes a story wrongly ignored by the mainstream.
I think Megan is correct that mainstream news outlets continue to dominate Internet news. Part of the reason for this is that newspapers have budgets large enough to send reporters to cover events and conduct investigations. Bloggers meet a different need--to cover stories that are being ignored by the mainstream media (e.g. Trent Lott, the Killian memos, and the early Dean campaign itself), and to collect information from a broader base of sources than any single reporter can access. I don't think that mainstream media will be overtaken by blogs anytime soon. But blogs will continue to be an influential supplement to mainstream media, correcting its errors and picking up the stories it misses. Nothing like this existed before the online era. At best, people could try to write letters to the editor, organize public protests, or hand out pamphlets if they felt that the news that matters to them was being ignored. Now they can gain a worldwide audience from their living rooms.
posted by John at 3:23 PM
1 Comments:
I agree entirely that blogs are an important supplement to mainstream news. The issue here, though, is whether blogs are truly altering the face of elections and politics. My point in my post on Hype for America was that blogs are important but will largely go unnoticed unless somehow connnected to channels of power. The Trent Lott example is precisely such a case -- an important piece of news filtered up through the political channels on the net to reach the mainstream media. It's these newly established political channels or currents that we're debating. Hype for America believes these channels are analogous to existing political and democratic channels from the people to the government. It's just online in a shiny new form.
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