QandO’s Jon Henke has an interesting post that expands on a recent criticism of the so-called “warbloggers” by Reason‘s Matt Welch, who observes:
Instead of galvanizing the apolitical truth squads of my fantasy world, weblogs became marvelous organizing tools for the most partisan citizens and groups.
Henke goes further, attempting to provide concrete examples of the blogosphere’s partisan reinforcement:
The blogosphere is, of course, composed of many dedicated flacks and apparatchiks with their own partisan agendas and biases. But it’s a tremendous shame that what Welch calls the “expressly political” acts produced by bloggers have not been consolidated into a fairly comprehensive encyclopedia of information on each issue.
The recent Washington Post story on the mobile biolabs, er, hydrogen trailers is a good example.
1. The Leftosphere jumped all over the apparent lie.
2. The Rightosphere pointed out that “two other teams that initially inspected the trailers” dissented from that view, which means the issue wasn’t quite as open and shut as the Post story would seem to indicate. Did the Leftosphere deal with that point? Well, no, not really. Kevin Drum even goes so far as to acknowledge the fact, but dismisses it by saying it “fits the usual MO of the Bush administration”. But, wait…”the administration was selectively biased” is a far cry from the blanket “Bush knowingly lied” that the Leftosphere is alleging. The point is simply not addressed.
3. Meanwhile, Slartibartfast at Obsidian Wings points out the incredible disparity between what a mobile biological lab would require and what the trailers actually had, and wonders how any minimally competent “expert” could have concluded that they were actually biological weapons labs. In a variety of fundamentally important areas, they were simply not even close. The Rightosphere doesn’t seem to have addressed that point and asked what kind of “experts” could have concluded they were mobile biolabs.
4. Finally, Seixon has questioned whether “hydrogen production” was really a plausible answer, either, and points out that the Post was scooped by “almost three years” by Judy Miller. So, why is it again news that “analysts [were] divided sharply over the function of the trailers”? The Leftosphere hasn’t really addressed that.
Critical thinking? No, mostly just critical.
Henke goes on to note that story selection itself also drives partisan reinforcement, offering the competing cases of Bilal Hussein, amply covered by the right (see Malkin, Jawa Report, Bill Roggio, Captain Ed, LGF, Glenn Reynolds, and others) and Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, covered by—among others—Kevin Drum, before concluding:
The blogosphere is a potentially wonderful tool for nuanced inspection, peer review and criticism  for creating a sophisticated understanding of complicated stories. Unfortunately, it’s also a very diffused network, and nobody is making sense of our rough draft of history, and bloggers seem more interested in partisan advantage than objective clarity.
[My emphasis]
While the can be no doubt that some blogs are strictly partisan and will actively attempt to “safeguard” a certain spin on a story, I think Jon (and Matt Welch) both drastically overstate the case—and introduce a despair that is easily remedied by a proper understanding of the grammar of blogs.
After all, a lot of blogs have comments sections and post updates, both of which expand on the original offering. Many also link to competing views.
Let’s take, for instance, the mobile biolabs story, the coverage of which Jon uses to advance his and Welch’s thesis. For my part, I took aim at the Post’s choice of how to present the story, which I believed to be another important question that goes to the media’s attempt at establishing and shaping public perception at home. This is but one part of the story, of course, but a comprehensive overview was not what I was after: I had my own thesis, and it was that aspect of the story that I chose to explore in my post.
Still, all of the competing questions / assertions noted by Jon in his post were covered either in my post (where I linked Brainster’s comprehensive timeline) or in the comments— and in fact, I think Slart first raised his Obsidian Wings post question in the comments here. I also linked Mahablog’s dissenting opinion.
And as a quick review of the subsequent thread shows, there was no shortage of dissenting opinion and give and take from all ideological stripes.
As Jon well knows, when we bloggers are writing these posts, we simply cannot address all the possible angles up front; we tend to deal with stories immediately as they break, and we tend to view them through a particular prism of interest to us.
There are, of course, many strictly “Hannity” or “Colmes” blogs, if you will  but if you look around enough, you can find sites that will cover stories comprehensively, even if they rely on the posts merely as a way to start the discussion. Here, for instance, commenter Ace linked to a David Kay quote that noted that the “silliest” explanation for these trailers was that they were used as “hydrogen producters” for meteorological balloons  which is, of course, rather ironic).
In short, I think there’s more critical thinking than simply partisan criticism happening out there. You just have to learn the new grammar of blog reading to find it. It is a hyperlinked medium, and with open comments, lots of “expert” and non expert testimony can be read and digested.
As to Jon’s second point about story selection, well, sure—most of that is a product of implied pushback against the other side of ideological divide, but in fairness, many high traffic blogs receive a lot of their tips from readers and tend to post on those stories that people have already shown an interest in. This, of course, reinforces the partisan aspect of a site—but ideological fidelity alone does not mean a blog is incapable of engaging in “nuanced inspection, peer review and criticism,” or that it is somehow incapable therefore of “creating a sophisticated understanding of complicated stories.”
****
Clint Taylor explores the WaPo story in more detail at the American Spectator.
Great post – chock full of yummy, bloggy goodness!
First, in order for the Rightosphere to point out the unfair slant of the WaPo story, it necessarily had to refer to the WaPo story.
Second, Slartibartfast raises an interesting point as to the intell assessment. However, it should surprise no one that the Rightosphere is going to place a priority on addressing the current skewing of the story than on the intell assessment itself, which is the proverbial spilled milk.
That being said, it might be asked why the WaPo and the Leftosphere chose to focus on the “Bush lied” meme, instead of the substantive point raised by Slartibartfast. After all, a consistent focus on the failures of the intell community might help keep the pressure on for intell reform, or at least weed out people who are doing incompetent intell analysis. Better intell would help the war effort, as the US should have the best picture it can for threat assessment. Better intell might even prevent the US from attacking when it need not do so.
As for the Leftosphere, the general answer is pretty simple. As for the WaPo and other trad media, it’s a bit more complicated and may have to do with the apparent reisitance of the CIA (and perhaps other intell agencies) to the Bush Administration. There may be some on the Left that still recognize the potential danger to a democracy of having a CIA that feel sfree to undermine and openly attacking the administration it is supposed to be serving (e.g., the clearance given to the Scheuer book). But they seem distinctly unrepresented in the Leftosphere. And those in the trad media are not about to turn on their sources… at least not while the GOP is running anything.
A couple of typos in my prior post:
“feels free” and attack” are the corrections.
Preview is your friend!
By their own admission, scientists and researchers employed by the Hussein government employed a charade designed to allow Saddam to believe that he had capabilities that were actually non-existant. I suggest the trailers were designed to fool Saddam’s inspection, not ours.
However, since i know a tiny bit about our overhead capacity, i can safely say that the dummy bioweapons labs most likely fooled overhead observers just as well as they fooled Saddam.
And isn’t that what we want? To err on the part of caution?
Here is a motto for you fools that think we don’t need covert ops like the NSA program.
Why do so many people make the mistake of thinking the blogosphere is any kind of monolithic entity? Or even a limited set of readily defineable and distinguishable entities?
Lots of stuff happens here, but almost any generalization about the blogosphere is nearly guaranteed to be wrong.
We are interacting in an amazing virtual space where much is said – but the space itself says nothing, any more than a theater performs.
TW – paper, as in “the paper itself has no opinions”.
Big money and big media will eventually buy into the blogosphere and try to remake it in their image. I think that’s where much of the criticism is coming from–that and the media’s penchant for navel gazing.
But blogs are structurally too different to be assimilated and wrecked. It’s too easy and cheap to go to market.
I think we’re hitting another turning point in the evolution of the medium. There’s a lot to choose from–much that isn’t very different. We’re a little tired on both the production and consumption side.
But someone will be first to market with something fresh, and we’re off to the races again.
i apolo for being off topic, jeff.
but i am increasingly concerned that our covert operations and classified programs are just being translated into political capital for the left.
Those programs are designed to keep us safe with the cognizance of our elected representatives, however hard they pretend that they are not cognizant. Are they confessing to being morons that had these programs run by them undercover? Or that they are too stupid to understand the implications of data collection and analysis?
I want Risen and the NYT tried as an unauthorized recipients of classified information.
And i want the leakers drawn and quartered.
What a load of crap. It sounds like this guy wants to be the one who gets to make the final judgment of history, whatever the hell that is. Typical last-word freak.
No one needs a monolithic, definitive voice telling everyone what’s what. There’s some kind of weird tic about human behavior that craves official-ness and authority.
Haven’t these people read Hayek? Decentralized information? Hello?
Me?
I take a less nuanced view – as Saddam had lost a war and, as such, was subject to a strict inspection regiment, full disclosure on weapons systems, research, stockpiles of precursor chemicals, et cetera – then it was incumbent on *him* to say ”Whooooooaaaaaaaaaaa, easy there fellas, those are hydrogen production trucks”
Honest to god – every ‘possible misconstruance’ story, to me, falls squarely on Saddam and Iraq.
The other thing the Iraq War proves is the fecklessness of the Clinton administration and the Left’s willingness, if not downright desire, to be finessed.
Saddam’s big mistake was believing that Bush wasn’t going to follow through on his clearly stated intentions.
That’s Saddam’s fault, not Bush’s.
.
It is amazing how ignorant of the basic nature of internet blogs some people insist on being.
Parker is right. Anyone can start a blog, and an awful lot do. They cover everything imaginable from every perspective imaginable. Among the political blogs, if you want your left-wing knee jerk reactions reinforced, there are blogs that will do that for you. If you want your right-wing knee jerk reactions reinforced, there are blogs that will do that for you. If you want a careful examination of the information, regardless of the result, there are blogs that will do that for you. And there are myriad subcategories (subattitudes and approaches) within these three groups.
So what’s the problem? That some bloggers don’t take the approach I want? So what? Other bloggers do and I’ll visit them more often.
The excerpts above are really an argument for internet censorship–it’s not enough that there are bloggers out there who will cater to me. the bloggers out there who don’t cater to me must be stopped! The bastards.
Well said. Especially in response to an argument coming from a purported libertarian. Although in Welch’s defense he did concede that his idea is but a fantasy.
A marketplace of ideas is what we need.
I think the key here is “fantasy world”. What he’s really trying to say is:
Now, you can complain because human nature is what it is, but it’s strange that a libertarian would be surprised by this.
That is one of the more disappointing efforts by Mr. Welch.
Yeah, how dare any of you get into a medium to express opinion and argue on behalf of your beliefs!
What a farcial pose for an alleged libetarian to strike.
Tim –
Many thanks for the sweetest words in the English language:
Can you teach this phrase to my wife?
The individual nature of the blogosphere inherently breeds (or should breed) partisanship more egregiously than collective, collaborative, corporate media. In blogs individual ego is constantly on the line, and individuals are subject to real peer pressure coming in the form of appreciation, adulation, and rebuke from respected co-bloggers, pundits, and commenters. There’s a lot of psychological roadblocks to switching positions when your opinion is on record.
Anyway, the general corporate tendency toward moderation makes the partisanship of today’s media all the more appalling. Maybe the media’s use of star power/demogogery to generate a public personality (i.e., Cronkite, Rather, Couric) kind of mitigates the mitigation properties of corporatism.
Anyway, I think congnitive dissonance and a subconscious defense of ego propels much of the blogosphere’s polarity. Those forces are incredibly difficult to overcome on an individual basis, and it’s all but a lost cause to believe that, on a societal or global scale, the truth will simply win out. The tendency of democracy–essentially the corporatism of governmental power–toward moderation is the best solution for this human failing, but there will never come a day of generalized enlightenment.
As the thread has turned more to an examination of the ‘sphere, I’ll just note that when Welch wrote:
the TW is “fantasy.” The Internet did not make the analysis of faction in Federalist No. 10 any less brilliant.
Yes. Exactly.
I’m not sure where some of you got the idea that I wanted internet regulation/censorship from my argument. It arises entirely from your own imaginations, though, because no part of what I wrote implied it.
My argument is that blogs currently resemble Crossfire more than they resemble Firing Line. Partisans yelling at each other, rather than intellectuals exchanging ideas. Echo chambers rather than debate halls. Sure, there’s some exchange of ideas, but it’s far from common.
In any event, my post ended with a very libertarian sentiment: “There’s a market niche there for somebody.” Certainly, bombthrowers and partisans will always have their audience, but I’d like to see more cross-ideological discussion, too.
I’ll second that.
I guess what bothers me, Jon, is the idea that “blogs currently resemble” any one thing much at all. Blogs are exceedingly varied. I could name you 25 blogs off the top of my head that are full of astonishingly sharp and insightful information, or at least references and discusses such ideas found elsewhere, without any bomb-throwing or vitriol.
The thing is, I bet none of them appear in the Top 25 in terms of traffic. Red meat is what brings in the traffic.
Why is that?
I suspect that, at the moment, the Internet is still television’s minor league. The internets are where propagandistic talking points are honed, sharpened, where the pithy phrase is developed and test-marketed, so that it can be eventually trotted out by a member of Congress or a spokesperson on one of the talk shows. The memes that are developed in the blogs this week are the buzz words of TV next week.
And, since television is still driving the bus, the blogs tailor their content according to TV’s demands.
TV is inherently anti-intellectual. It is never serious, even on the so-called serious shows like Firing Line. If Firing Line is what passes for “intellectuals exchanging ideas” or “debate halls,” then we were in sad, sad shape long before the Internet came along.
In the Lincoln-Douglas debates, they would go at it for 2-3 hours, take a break for dinner, and everyone would come back to the debate hall to listen to 4 more hours of talk. How was such a thing possible? The 19th century was the age of print, not television. Print develops a far more serious mind, promotes rationality. As opposed to TV, which does the opposite. Such a debate format is inconceivable today.
Even though the Internet is print-based, it still takes its cues from TV to a large extent. And so, to that extent, it is all about bomb-throwing, the zinger, the catch-phrase, the emotional appeal.
As long as TV remains the dominant medium in our society, the kind of partisan yelling you mention will remain the dominant mode of discourse.
Another explanation for the internet’s anti-intellectual hostility is the distance factor. As George Carlin once said, you scream “asshole” to the guy in the next car on the freeway, but you mutter it under your breath when you’re talking about the guy standing right next to you in line. The internet represents the first forum where pencil-neck ass-itches like Kos have been able to spout off their hateful crap in relative safety.
I don’t disagree with you. It would be nice to see a greater degree of real discussion with a willingness to consider the validity of opposing viewpoints among all participants. Failure to appreciate or undertand your opponents position is a cheap form of rhetoric. Much of that does exists, but often the little bit of reasoned debate that does occur can be buried in the seas of pure partisanship and preconceived notions.
Unfortunately, since the internet represents the closest thing yet to a free market of ideas, and the vast majority of participants seem content to remain ideologically unchallenged (and lets be realistic, who wants to have their worldview challenged on a daily, much less hourly basis) I must conclude that large numbers of people do not share these ideals and are, instead, quite satisfied to live within their partisan comfort zones.
TW: front Sweet Jesus, where do I begin…
does not mean a blog is incapable of engaging in “nuanced inspection, peer review and criticism,†or that it is somehow incapable therefore of “creating a sophisticated understanding of complicated stories.â€Â
Actually, I think this guy is onto something. Blogs are a great source of raw material. You can wade into a discussion on Slashdot about “global warming” for example or computers and learn a lot from real experts.
The problem with blogs is that they are not condensed, edited, fact-checked, refined, or reorganized by ANYONE, EVER. Add to this the fact that 75% of blog traffic is one-liners or opinion and you have a very high noise ratio. And an awful lot of forks and topics.
The OP was right on the money in the sense that blogs do not respect the idea of a factual account of history. Every blog on the internet contains enough factual material to write a book. Sadly, not one person has yet to try.
“Army of Davids” ring a bell? “Crashing the Gates” maybe? “Blog” perhaps? Every heard of Bill Whittle? Maybe James Lileks?
broodlinger, I would go back and re-assess that stance.
Sure. Nobody in the blogosphere EVER checks on one another…
HUH?
“Army of Davids†ring a bell? “Crashing the Gates†maybe? “Blog†perhaps? Every heard of Bill Whittle? Maybe James Lileks?
No, but thank you. I’ll look into it. Are these books condensed versions of blogs, or are they just books written by people who ran blogs? I suppose the latter is fine, but it’s a bit plagiaristic to gather a bunch of people’s opinions and then rewrite them as if you’re the smart guy.
Sure. Nobody in the blogosphere EVER checks on one another…
Yeah, my bad for speaking in absolutes. My point is, people in the blogosphere do check each other. Sometimes. Then they post a note about it which gets lost among hundreds of others.
Nobody is assigned the task of sorting and rebuilding discussion threads. Weblog discussions, for the most part, take place in a single day and are forgotten. My anger is mostly directed at Slashdot and its ilk, because it’s very old and huge and completely stagnant from a structural perspective. PW is fortunately small enough that editing is not really required and this is a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem.
How do you read a discussion that has 700 messages and 20-30 interwoven topics? I admit I’m not much of a blogger but it seems the format of Article–>List of Comments is pretty much the de facto standard. It’s nice but it doesn’t scale.
I think we read blogs that appeal to us, for whatever reason. After awhile, we learn to trust the abilities of certain people. To me, Jeff is a great resource because he pours a lot of thought, effort, and research into what he does, and I’ve learned to trust him (except on the topics of Terpsichorean armadillos, and his somewhat colorful view of women’s correctional facilities). He has a lot more credibility, in my mind, than say, Stone Phillips, who is, to me, just a guy in a $1000 dollar suit with a $150 haircut, who might well be peddling to me information on GM trucks from the NBC pyrotechnics division, or whatever he was handed in a brown paper envelope from one Lucy Ramirez of Points Unknown, Texas. Which is not to say that Stone Phillips is dishonest, but rather that I have no way of knowing whether Stone Phillips is dishonest, because I have no way of checking his sources. I check on Jeff’s sources from time to time (because they’re always hyperlinked), and find that Jeff doesn’t make convenient use of the Dowdian ellipsis, and doesn’t quote selectively. He’s fair minded and presents his sources accurately. I know this from having read hundreds of blog posts of his. In other words, I’ve done my due diligence.
There are other blogs that are more precisely in line with me, politically, but who I never read—or if I do read them, it’s after I’ve already read my more trusted sources. These are blogs that have failed one of three tests—they’ve failed to a) educate me, b) amuse me, or c) have misrepresented their sources or have drawn conclusions that aren’t reasonably found in the facts, or fail to take into account some of the more obvious alternative explanations. Usually it’s the second test that gets them. And my biggest complaint with the left side of the blogosphere is not that they can’t make good arguments—there’s three or four folks on that side I respect—but that they’re just not funny.
The problem isn’t the lack of editors. The readers are the editors. The key is to find writers who’d you’d want to read if you were putting together your own New York Times each day, and whom you trust more than Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, who in my mind have failed all three of my tests.
[Eeyore]Thanks for noticing me.[/Eeyore]
Really, thanks. I didn’t take issue over the timeline, who said what when, who lied, who simply said something that turned out later not to be the case, etc, because I think that these things are nearly orthogonal to my point, and already addressed at length by many people across this great blogosphere of ours.
It’s certainly possible that a group of experts (actual or purported) went there, trudged around the trailers, and said “yep, mobile biolabs, all right”, and then went home. Sometimes the truth takes a while to sink in, and my personal time-constant on things sinking in is worse than most, I think, so I’m a little slow to fling rotten fruit at others who have the same problem.
Still, it would’ve been nice to get the people onsite who wound up contributing to the Duelfer Report. Much less embarrassing, maybe. That’s one of my many gripes with the Bush administration: that they seem to be way, way too quick on the draw when making claims to the public. Some see that as deliberate disinformation; I just see it as sloppy.
And of course, I’m being accused of being a closet liberal by some on the right and of being a right-wing-talking-point-driven automaton by some on the left. Not anyone that I consider to be saying so with any credibility, mind, so no harm.
All of the above aside, I think it’s important to keep in mind that at some point long after it was important to be right the first time, a group of people collected information that made the initial assessment look laughable, and I think it’d be valuable to understand on what basis that initial assessment was made, and who made it, and what they have to say about it now.
Regards,
Slart
This one is fairly simple: The trailers are irrelevant in the grand scheme for “Bush’s Rush to WAR”. It was a good thing they were found, and if they are NOT weapons labs, the response should be simply “whew thank god”.
The REASON we went on an asskicking spree is becasue Saddam refused to co-operate with inspectors. Even if we NEVER FIND a damned thing, the war is still gravy.
Our mission was to get weapons inspectors into Iraq, by force. Mission accomplished.