Marc Fisher
One morning at the height of last fall's campaign in
Later, when I wrote a column sparked by that release, comments on at least two blogs questioned whether I had ripped the item off from a blogger.
As if the relationships among government, the campaign industry and the news media were not troubled enough, now comes a new player that purports to be a fresh, grassroots voice but is rapidly evolving into an agent for spin, stealth identities and yes, scattered around the wild world of blogging, some aggressive and original reporting. The new political blogs sometimes look and act like purveyors of journalism, but at least as often, they play the roles of propagandist, gossip, campaign clubhouse and vehicle for personal attacks.
In most places, state-level political blogs are still a novelty, but in a few, campaign blogs last fall blossomed well beyond their rudimentary roots in Howard Dean's 2004 presidential bid. In Virginia, one of only two states that hold gubernatorial elections the year after a presidential race, blogs became important enough that some campaign managers neglected their daily duties to obsess over the latest blogospheric gossip, state regulators began watching the blogs for compliance with campaign finance laws, lawmakers started grumbling about how to regulate speech on the blogs, and bloggers themselves began talking about setting standards and figuring out just how much coordination makes sense in a fraternity of extreme individualists.
In many states, you can count the number of all-politics blogs on your fingers.
By the time
They became important enough that Kaine granted them a group interview; his Republican opponent, Jerry Kilgore, appeared on a blog for a Q&A session; and campaigns and newspapers alike honored the blogs by imitating them, launching link-laden Web diaries of their own.
Was the bloggers' collective work journalism? Before risking a response, let's say what political blogging is as it enters its toddler phase:
Soap opera: For months, bloggers, who are each other's most dedicated readers, peppered each other's comment boards with guesswork, investigative probing and heaping piles of gossip about..the true identities of two of their brethren who were operating under pseudonyms. In each case, the blogosphere managed to out its targets. Commonwealth Conservative turned out to be Chad Dotson, the elected commonwealth's attorney of
Secret society/budding fraternity: After months of slashing at each other and building alliances on their blogs, the proverbial pajama-clad pundits emerged from their basements and bedrooms and gathered at a bloggers' summit. They discovered that yes, they were geeks, and yes, they were policy wonks, and yes, they cared more about the minutiae of politics than the average bear. And yes, they disagreed vociferously on everything from ideology to whether they are the Replacement for the Evil Mainstream Media or Just a Bunch of Guys Having Fun or Willing Tools of the Partisan Political Machine. Whatever their differences, they discovered that, well, they kind of like each other, and maybe they could just all be..friends.
Envelope-pusher: Some bloggers developed standards and stuck to them. Other bloggers let a thousand flowers bloom – and showed some pretty ugly roots. Anonymous posts accused opposing campaigns of all manner of dirty tricks, some of which even turned out to be true. The blogs helped push discussion of several candidates' use of anti-gay tactics into the open. But one potentially explosive allegation – that a statewide candidate had a homosexual lover – never made it beyond a few blogs, and for good reason: There was never any remotely credible evidence behind the chatter.
So are the bloggers journalists?
I asked some of the state's top scribes. Well, they're good sources of information, says Bob Gibson, political reporter at the Daily Progress in
At the Washington Post, reporter Mike Shear, who runs the state capital bureau in
So if the reporters look to blogs for tips and politicos depend on them for zeitgeist, is this journalism we are witnessing? Not quite, says Shear. The Post's own campaign blog, Race to Richmond, demonstrated the gulf between the real blogosphere and its corporate imitators. Shear's items never had the gossipy feel of the solo practitioners – Post editors decided from the start that reporters on the blog could be snarky but were not to opine on the news. But the Post blog, along with one by the Richmond Times-Dispatch's Jeff Schapiro, was routinely cited by bloggers as a source of dependable information, a basis for commentary.
"The difference is that the bloggers don't go anywhere; they don't do reporting," Shear says. "Ninety-nine percent of their stuff is us – they're like leeches." Ouch. But Shear gives credit where it's due, and he singles out the Not Larry Sabato blog as one that indeed added information to the mix.
The problem: The information was not always right. Not Larry Sabato was a brash blogger, happily dishing out predictions months before the vote. The slogan under the blog's name read, "100% accurate so far." Then, in August, the blog reported that the chairman of
But Callahan was in fine health; there was no story. The blog took down the item and issued a quick apology. And the slogan atop the blog was changed: "99.4% accurate so far."
"My site is a little gossipy – headlines grab people," says Ben Tribbett, who outed himself as Not Larry Sabato in mid-October in an anti-climactic posting about how "it just became pointless to keep it a secret." Tribbett, 25, started his blog in March, shortly after backing away from his own campaign for a House seat from
Tribbett never made much of a secret of where he stood. Clearly a Democrat, he had obvious favorites among the candidates. Still, insiders flocked to his site because he seemed to have details unavailable elsewhere. Tribbett has never worked as a journalist but rather is a former campaign manager with close connections to many of the state's political pros. At the peak of the campaign, Not Larry Sabato was getting about 15,000 hits a day, making it one of the most popular political sites in the state. Tribbett credits anonymity for his success, saying it allowed some of
Eventually, unmasking Not Larry Sabato became enough of a parlor game that Tribbett felt compelled to come clean. He suffered through a few days of vituperative recriminations on his comments board – readers seemed especially miffed that Tribbett had moved to
Tribbett, who, like several other bloggers, makes his living as a computer consultant, found himself devoting several hours a day to a hobby that provided no remuneration. He loved the attention and the influence.
Like many showbiz impresarios, Tribbett developed a certain disdain for his audience. "If I were a candidate, I'd order these staffers off the blogs. They spend too much time on it. Within minutes of me posting, they're there answering. I've had to downgrade candidates' chances when I see the manager sitting on the blog all day gossiping." (Bloggers loved the attention, but after the vote, some political observers wondered whether the campaigns' overindulgence of blogs changed the outcome of some races. "Candidates have a unique ability to focus on the wrong thing when it comes to strategy," says Sean O'Brien, executive director of the
Tribbett had no illusions about being a journalist; he was happy as an insider, delivering "crack to political junkies." He says his audience included candidates, managers and consultants. "I gave them a place to float ideas, trick the other side, have a conversation with your opponents."
Some bloggers, buying into the '90s rhetoric about the Web creating a new paradigm, do see their sites as a replacement for the loathed mainstream media. But most acknowledge their dependence on newspapers for the raw material on which they then riff. "I'm not a journalist and don't claim to be," says Chad Dotson, the 32-year-old prosecutor whose Commonwealth Conservative blog was perhaps the season's most popular pro-Republican site. "But I do some reporting, and I aim to be reliable. This is the Wild West of reporting (and I use that term very loosely), but if I said something completely off the reservation, I would expect that bloggers on the left side would come on my blog and correct and criticize me. It is self-governing in that way."
Dotson started his blog in 2004 under a pseudonym, "John Behan." "I was kind of doing it for myself, and I never blogged about my job," he says. As an elected official and the face of the criminal justice system in his community, Dotson felt the need to separate his official role from his personal political expression. But as with Tribbett, ferreting out the blogger's real identity became more of the story than the content of the blog, so when the Post's Shear revealed Dotson as the blogger, Dotson immediately copped to his alter ego. "I realized it had to be out there," he says. "Politicians should blog; it's a great way to be open with the public."
Dotson jokes that as a result of his extensive electronic trail – he spends up to two hours a night at the laptop after the rest of his family has gone to bed – "I'll never be a Supreme Court justice. I'm creating a record of my thoughts, and there's always a chance it'll come back and bite me if I run for another political office later." But he's committed to the form; it satisfies his politics jones and helps raise his profile. Dotson's blog was one of the quickest and most informative during the campaign; he argued forcefully but courteously for his side, adding value by sifting important developments out of the daily noise of rumors and allegations.
"Much of the blogosphere depends on the legwork of the mainstream media," Dotson says. "We need the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Washington Post and so on. And the MSM is starting to realize that bloggers are an important part of the system. I think of it as a general store where we sit around and talk
Over the course of the campaign, Dotson became friends with Waldo Jaquith, a 27-year-old Web developer in
"I hate the whole approach of being anti-media or even using the initials MSM," says Jaquith, who got married in September and had to promise his wife he'd back away from the keyboard after the election. "I like reporters. If somebody said you could magically be governor or a political reporter for the Washington Post, I don't know which I'd pick. I'll be honest: I write for you. It's for journalists and my friends and family." Nothing thrills him more than to see one of his items morph into a story in the daily paper, as some of his posts examining campaign contributions did.
But Jaquith is clear that blogs operate in a different universe, with different rules: "Bloggers are not a model of bipartisanship or a model of journalism. We jump to conclusions; we say stupid things; we say things that are wrong."
During the campaign, Jaquith found a state legislator, Del. Vivian Watts, using the phrase "one of our own" to tout her candidacy in a mailing. "It appeared to be racist," Jaquith says. "I went after her for using what I saw as sneaky code words." But immediately after the post went up on waldo.jaquith.org,
Six hours after his initial post, Jaquith issued a follow-up retreating from his accusation. "I posted that I was wrong, and I presented all the evidence," he says. "That's what I get for jumping on it before getting the basic information that any decent journalist would get before publishing. As I said, we're not reporters."
The line between blogging and reporting gets blurrier on Bacon's Rebellion, a site run, unlike most other
His e-zine – a collection of columns, written in traditional form by commentators from around
In their blog entries, Burke and Bacon write with a point of view, in typical blog tone. One item expressing outrage over an editorial in the
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