You can expect President George Bush to name his Supreme Court nominee any day (or minute) now and — the prevailing perception goes — you can expect bloggers to begin a bitter battle over it.
You might want to say “DUH!” and that in itself shows a shift in the journalistic landscape. The perception that comes through in a USA Today piece which, apart from specific content, is this underlying message: yes, blogs are a part of a new journalistic frontier….and they are a haven for negativity, on both sides.
And, before we get a ton of angry comments from both sides, we’ll say yes: what’s wrong with that when the at stake is the course of the country? But the bottom line is: blogs have carved out a niche and if you carefully read the USA Today story it isn’t as if they are viewed as the most trustworthy sources. (But then many will say those who pass judgement are untrustworthy…which is a whole different debate).
We have to admit: at first we read accounts of this story and thought it only centered on one side but it does detail the political warriors on both sides — although the focus now is on the left since it’ll be the left that will likely go on the warpath against Bush’s nominee. Let’s face it: if you’re holding your breath for a symbol of unity who’ll unite the country you better pick out a spot right now where you plan to fall when you pass out.
USA Today’s Peter Johnson writes:
Right-wing Internet bloggers dogged Dan Rather in “Memogate” so effectively that it might have cost him his anchor chair at CBS News.
Left-wing bloggers discredited Ed Klein’s book, The Truth About Hillary, so fiercely that even Clinton haters called the book a hatchet job.
There are plenty of other examples of how bloggers on both sides of the political aisle, when aroused, have sunk their teeth into an issue or person in the news.
Up next?
No matter whom President Bush nominates to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court or whether Bush must replace her and ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who says he has no plans to step down, nominees are going to be fair game for bloggers.
This is a first; the Internet was in its infancy and bloggers weren’t around the last time there was an opening on the high court. That was in 1994, when Stephen Breyer was nominated by President Clinton and later confirmed to the court.
Gone are the days when it would usually take disparaging information from an insider to derail a judge’s nomination.
It notes that conservative bloggers predict the left will launch an all out assault if the nominee leans to the right — because as we all know conservative bloggers have never gone on the warparth against Democrats because they leaned too far left for them.
Blogs have evolved this way. How could a blog get massive “hits” without steadily assaulting on one political side and becoming a rallying point for partisans? Well there are some examples of that, in fact, such as Wil Wheaton… USA Today contains this quote from Jeff Jarvis:
Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine says bloggers, armed with the vast information capabilities of the Web, will do what reporters in traditional media have always done: dig up a nominee’s controversial opinions. “There are only so many reporters in the world. There are countless bloggers.”
Jarvis notes that liberal bloggers such as Arianna Huffington and outlets such as Daily Kos are helping to set the spin by saying they’ll “hold their noses and say they’d take (presidential counselor) Alberto Gonzales over other likely choices, in part because Gonzales would irritate the right-wingers who irritate them.”
And it contains some reaction from some experts:
Just a few years ago, partisan bloggers “were Internet-based virtual nomads lacking standing or credibility until the Republicans and Democrats gave them standing and legitimacy with accreditation at their national conventions, so they reap what they sowed,” says Tom McPhail, a communications professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
He says that “given bloggers’ track record of being negative, this gives a clear structural advantage to court nominees that have already survived federal hearings or media scrutiny, like current or former Cabinet members or senators.”
“No fact checkers, no editors, no professional rules of the road will make the nominee a high-profile blogger catch — unless they were a hermit for their careers, which is highly unlikely or they would not even make the short list.”
In that context, if GWB does in fact pick someone who has a tiny paper trail it sets a new precedent: you pick candidates who don’t have a lot of paper that can be used against them but who’ve given enough assurances in other ways that they are what you seek. This could, in fact, set the trend for appointing Supreme Court justices in the 21st century, given the new information and opinion battlefields. MORE:
Tom Rosenstiel of the Project for Excellence in Journalism says that it will be up to “traditional media with the largest resources to knock down bad stuff that the bloggers put out” about whomever Bush nominates.
Get the perception now?
If you read through the whole piece what comes across is blogs as what they actually are — unedited opinion and often news sources. Sources with (thankfully some say, unthankfully others say) no “gatekeepers.” As such, some of the more explosive info or allegations that come out on blogs have to be investigated.
When it comes to blogs, it has literally come down to the old saying: “Consider the source.” Some readers act on that every day — by just visiting “their” side’s blogs,
Meanwhile, just who has the resources to investigate most of the time? The mainstream media.
On the other hand, bloggers would argue that their devoted readers are so plentiful and often boasting of expertise that they can vet the most dramatic tidbits of fact or rumor.
Still, on balance, what we see here is the preception of bloggers as writers who throw lots of negative stuff out there that needs to be confirmed before it can be totally believed.
Perhaps the message for the mainstream media is: FYI, bloggers on the left and right can indeed find something you miss or get wrong. Perhaps the message to bloggers on the left and right is: FYI, you better make sure anything you put out there is accurate because each piece of info that’s overblown or inaccurate is going to sandbag the credibility of not just your blog but blogs in general as a news source versus a partisan argument source.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.