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.
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.