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Time’s Joe Klein On Blogging: “The Elements Of Vile”
Time’s Joe Klein is blogging here on the newsmagazine’s Washington-beat “Swampland” blog and he is struck by the nastiness of blog posts and discussions.
His comments are pegged to the mini-firestorm over John Edward’s hiring of two progressive bloggers. His post should be read in full but he makes two excellent points to take up here.
He notes how our political culture has changed due to the altered media and debate style environments. He focuses particularly on the left:
It’s obvious that the current level of vitriol on the left is a reaction to nearly twenty years of sewage emanating from Rush et al. It’s also a product of the times: There’s a whole generation of people who believe that serious political discourse consists of Pat Buchanan and Eleanor Clift screaming at each other. The intemperance on the left has three other sources (1) justifiable fury over the Bush adminstration (2) justifiable fury over the way the media treated Clinton and, to a certain extent, Bush and (3) ideologues of any sort tend to be obnoxious. The trouble is, obnoxious doesn’t win you many friends or elections.
However, any reader of blogs who isn’t pushing a candidate or a party will have to add: the vitriol is all over the place these days. It is not limited to the left or the right or the center.
His key word here is “fury.” If someone disagrees with someone a common response across party or ideological lines is “fury” rather than calm counter points of discussion. Just read comments on most blogs (ours here are more civil than many). Or posts. After you read blogs after a while you start to wonder: is there ANY day when there is NO outrage over an issue, a person or another blog?
If you think vitriol is limited to one side, then when you have a free afternoon, just go through our blogroll and visit the blogrolls of weblogs on the left and right. There is a vitriol and fury epidemic. Or visit memeorandum and check out the links to various blogs. Or go to Technorati, type in an issue and read the posts.
Another key point:
Now, being civil doesn’t mean you can’t call a fool a fool. It’s means you can’t call a fool “a wet turd of a human fart.” (A sobriquet employed by my favorite character in Primary Colors, Libby Holden.) Vileness is fun, but it’s kid fun–and there is very important business to be transacted in the next few years. And promising candidates like John Edwards don’t need to be weighed down by the ill-considered anger of their supporters.
A good point, however, if candidates choose to use bloggers then they’re probably going to have to choose between bloggers with a large readership who are active in politics and in the blog world and may have written some things that would not be allowed in newspapers due to bluntness or language, or bloggers who have never crossed the line or written an offensive word on the right or on the left and may not have large readership or networking experience.
The ideal of blogging is of lofty “citizen journalists” and high-minded discussion. The reality of it is that discussion often seems like people informally talking and arguing at a sports event or on talk radio. A lot of the time blog discussion on the right and left isn’t exactly like discussion in jacket-and-tie at a low-key college seminar.
When the candidates hire bloggers, they are (mistakenly) assuming a blogger will have a greater “in” on getting the candidate’s message across due to his/her contacts or expertise.
But the real advantage is probably that weblog writers can perhaps relate a lot better due to the way they express themselves (sans obscenities, of course) to bloggers, the media and potential supporters. The actual language may be the same in journalism and blogging, but they way of communicating isn’t always the same. We never fall into such cliches here. Heh.
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11 Responses to “Time’s Joe Klein On Blogging: “The Elements Of Vile””
Dear Mr. Klien, I give you… the 1960′s, where our current ‘adult’ generation of ‘progressives’ honed their rhetorical skills.
As a lagniappe, you are invited to look at just about any American university during the Reagan years, any arts community… and a pretty fair chunk of your own print media.
‘Sewage on the right,’ along with that tired old trope ‘suppression of dissent’ remain, as always, synonymous with ‘No fair! You’re talking back to me!’
Klein hits on today’s growth venue, but in fact political discourse went through years of coarsening and dumbing down during the antiwar protest years of the late 1960s and 1970s.
I seem to recall how back then a bunch of protesters spent a day or two occupying the rooftops and upper floors of several buildings at Columbia Universtiy. They passed the time screaming obscenities at passers-by. They got news coverage, but had no impact on war policy or politics.
With the coming of Ronald Reagan the burgeoning, well-financed right-wing noise machine — of which Time/CNN is a part — took over where campus radicals and itinerant sociopaths had left off. Klein’s mention of Rush Limbaugh as emblematic is fair but so vastly understates the depth and breadth of this development that it’s ridiculous. Klein should spend some time at Red State, Free Republic and Blogs for Bush.
Sure, there are bloggers on the left who trade in incendiary prose and a steady flow of profanity-laced insults, in posts and comments alike.
What it comes down to is that the blogosphere is like a city, with tough neighborhoods where it’s easy to get mugged and relatively safe, orderly areas where people behave themselves rather well — the Oh!pinion weblog being one example, at least most of the time.
I read a fascinating article in the most recent Discover magazine about how the Internet came to be so loony and full of bile. It’s all pegged down to, of all things, the war on drugs. Basically, the Internet has an excessive amount of anonymity because the people who created it (and the founders of the EFF, for one) were scared that the government would ship them off to jail for smoking dope, so they made sure it was easy to be anonymous. And because we all can use pseudonyms instead of our real names (Angliss is my real last name, BTW – I personally feel it’s a cop-out to hide behind a pseudonym), we don’t have any social filters between our emotional responses to what we read and our fingers.
Fascinating little piece.
Joe Klein. D’oh. The guy who was for the Iraq war, before he claimed he was against it. I guess with this idiotic column he only wants to divert attention from his shameful spinning of his uncritical stance in the past. Liar, liar, pants on fire…
It basically boils down to people behaving like adults or children, but then again I hide behind a pseudonym
The wisdom of the crowds, part I…
As more mainstream media types venture into the blogosphere, more journalists are surprised by the vitriol here. It’s doesn’t lend itself to a civil discussion, they might well say. Heck, I’ve said the same. From Joe Gandelman at The Moderate……
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