by Henry Farrell on January 29, 2006
I was at the bloggers-meet-journalists lunch a few days ago which Matt Stoller and others have been talking about, and even tried to say something, but was shut down by the moderator, who thought that I was going to say something else altogether. What struck me (and what I was going to say) was that the journalists there didn’t seem to understand how the blogosphere worked at all. My half-assed explanation of why is as follows …
I can understand how the people at the _Post_ would get upset at hundreds of commenters from Atrios’ or Kos’s comments sections showing up to make their objections heard – while they’re nothing on, say, the denizens of the slimepit at LGF, their manner of criticism can be … robust. I’m willing to believe that there were some commenters who didn’t make it through the moderation system, and who got hateful (Howell suggested that there were some pretty nasty sexual epithets in there, and I believed her). But even so, the incomprehension with which journalists responded to bloggers seemed to me to point to something more fundamental. Journalism and blogging have different internal systems of authority. Newspaper articles aspire to presenting a comprehensive, neutral and _authoritative_ judgement regarding the facts at hand in a particular matter. Of course, they don’t always succeed in doing this at all – hence the need for ombudsmen, correction columns etc. But even if this standard is often more honoured in the breach than the observance, it still is the basis for the journalistic claim to authority, and status. Blogposts are quite different – they’re arguments in an ongoing debate. They don’t aspire to any sort of finality or authoritativeness (and indeed they’re often updated in response to new arguments or facts). They comment on, and respond to, what others are saying.
The point is that they have very different – and clashing – notions of where authority and responsibility come from. Each newspaper article has the form of a discrete statement, which is supposed to be as authoritative as possible on its own ground. Each blogpost has the form of an intervention in an ongoing conversation – the blogger’s authority rests in part on her willingness to respond to others and engage in argument with them. A blogger who doesn’t respond to good counter-arguments is being irresponsible (of course many bloggers are irresponsible in this way; there isn’t much in the way of formal policing of this norm). These forms of authority are difficult to reconcile with each other, because the latter in large part undermines the former. If journalists start systematically responding to their critics, and getting drawn into conversations about whether or not they were right when they made a particular claim, then they’re effectively admitting that the articles they have written aren’t all that authoritative in the first place. They’re subject to debate and to revision. Thus, in part, the tendency for journalists like Jack Shafer to dismiss criticism from bloggers and their commenters as “organized riots” and lynch mobs. It’s a fundamental threat to their notions of where journalistic authority comes from. Thus also, I suspect, Howell’s reluctance to respond directly to critics like Brad DeLong, when it would obviously (to a blogger) be in her best interests to do so.
Comments are welcome – as I say, these are thoughts in the process of being formed (an intervention in an ongoing conversation if you like).
by Henry Farrell on January 29, 2006
Via Orin Kerr, this Newsweek story about Jack Goldsmith and his efforts to oppose the Bush administration’s claims to sweeping powers to authorize torture and to wiretap American citizens. It’s become more and more clear over the last few months that Goldsmith played a very honourable role behind the scenes – while he’s certainly a conservative, he appears to be one who’s prepared to stick to his principles when it’s politically difficult. When Goldsmith was appointed to Harvard Law School, some of his liberal colleagues protested, arguing that he might have been complicit in authorizing torture (others, more reasonably, were concerned about his theories of international law). At this stage, I believe that the former owe him a fulsome public apology.
by Henry Farrell on January 25, 2006
CT readers who aren’t already following the Moretti discussion on the Valve, should head over to read Cosma Shalizi’s essay on Moretti’s approach to the analysis of literature. It’s one of the best pieces of scholar blogging that I’ve ever seen, if it’s not in fact _the_ best such piece.
by Henry Farrell on January 24, 2006
Via Robin Vargese at the excellent 3 Quarks Daily, the Graduate Students Organizing Committee at NYU have set up a hardship fund , which will help defray “indispensable expenses such as health care, utilities, and rent for those who have lost their pay.” Need I say that this is an important cause, not only for the grad students at NYU, but at other universities too?
by Henry Farrell on January 21, 2006
This Financial Times article (sub required) has a quote from an email written by Michael Scanlon, former bagman for Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, which sums up the modern Republican party in two sentences.
bq. Michael Scanlon … explained the strategy in an e-mail to a tribal client. “Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them,” he wrote. “The wackos get their information [from] the Christian right, Christian radio, e-mail, the internet and telephone trees.”
Fundamentalist wackos, stirred up by cynical political operators in it for the money. Not a pretty picture.
by Henry Farrell on January 21, 2006
Danny Glover at the _National Journal_ has written one of the best summary articles on blogs and their consequences for US politics that I’ve seen. It picks up on something that’s under-reported and under-studied – how blogs change politics through reframing political and policy issues. Most assessments of blogs and politics focus on how bloggers have successfully demanded the heads of Trent Lott, Eason Jordan etc on platters. This is the most visible consequence of blogs – but not the most important. The more fundamental (albeit much more difficult to measure) impact of blogs has been in reframing political issues such as Social Security for the media and other elite political actors, thus helping to change (sometimes in quite fundamental ways) the basis of political conversations. As Dan Drezner and I claimed the year before last, blogs’ primary impact on politics is through this kind of indirect influence. The Corey Maye case is a good example of a case where blogs have failed to have an impact, as Mark Kleiman (his site seems to be down; hence no direct link) suggested some weeks ago. Even though it created a massive spike of attention on both the left and right of the blogosphere, it hasn’t had wider repercussions – because other political elites (journalists, policy-makers) haven’t picked up on it. But where other political elites do have an incentive to pick up on what bloggers are saying (as was true in the Social Security debate, where journalists desperately needed ways of framing and simplifying a complex and highly salient political issue for their readers) the political effects can be very substantial indeed.
by Henry Farrell on January 19, 2006
There’s a short profile of me up at the National Journal’s Blogometer today. Feel at liberty to slag me off in comments.
by Henry Farrell on January 18, 2006
The Boston Review has just put the results of a very interesting opinion survey online. They’ve asked respondents whether they would approve of military intervention to support a number of goals, and provided a breakdown of how party ID correlates with the answers. Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to approve of military intervention to ensure the supply of oil, to destroy terrorist camps, and to assist in the spread of democracy. The differences are much less marked when military intervention is intended to prevent genocide or to assist an ally under attack. When military intervention is intended to help the UN support international law, Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to be in favour. This provides a valuable corrective to the widely discussed Transatlantic Trends survey of a few months ago, which reported that Democrats were far less likely than Republicans to support interventions aimed at helping the international spread of democracy. As I interpret these results (and I acknowledge that they could be interpreted in various ways), Democrats are more likely than the earlier numbers suggest to favour such interventions – but only if they’re in accordance with international law. The interesting question – which we’ll never know the answer to – is how Republicans and Democrats would have responded to these questions in 2000 or even in late 2001. I suspect that Democrats would have been more likely than today to favour intervention to spread democracy, but that very few Republicans indeed would have been favorably disposed to actions of this sort.
The Boston Review suggests that this is the first in a series of ‘State of the Nation’ surveys that they’ll be running and reporting – this looks set to be a very valuable resource indeed.
by Henry Farrell on January 18, 2006
by Henry Farrell on January 13, 2006
I’m updating the syllabus for my Politics of the Internet course, and looking, as I have been looking since I began teaching it, for an academic article/policy paper that makes the case _against_ filesharing and P2P services. There are plenty of articulate pieces written by pro-P2P types, but nothing from the other side, apart from RIAA press releases. When I’m teaching a controversial topic, I like to have good pieces written by people on both sides. Anyone have any pointers?
by Henry Farrell on January 12, 2006
by Henry Farrell on January 11, 2006
The _Boston Review_ has posted a very interesting forum where Barry Posen puts the realist case for getting out of Iraq, and various pundits and political types respond. The WWW version, however, is missing the introductory note from the print version of the forum, which closes with the following.
bq. Unfortunately, however, none of the proponents of the current policy whom we invited to respond – including several who have previously commented publicly on Posen’s views – were prepared to join the debate here. Suffice it to say that we sought a very broad range of opinion in the interests of moving policy forward, and we regret that proponents were unwilling to join in.
by Henry Farrell on January 10, 2006
Following up on Chris’s post below, Dan Solove at Concurring Opinions has also written a post on the pros and cons of blogging without tenure. In favour: name recognition, exposure to other disciplines, increased ability to network, higher google rankings, and ability to talk to non-academics. Against: risks to reputation if your blogging seems shrill or frivolous to colleagues, and risks of distraction from producing peer reviewed articles (or whatever it is that you’re supposed to produce in order to get tenure in your discipline). I’m probably the wrong person to opine on this, as (a) I started blogging precisely in order to talk about things that I couldn’t talk about in my research, and (b) despite these initial intentions, have ended up turning blogs into part of my research, and thus something (I hope!) that contributes to tenure chances etc. But I would be interested to hear from CT reading academics – whether untenured (what are the tradeoffs that you perceive in blogging or not blogging as an untenured assistant or visiting professor or whatever?) or tenured (what do you think of junior colleagues blogging? A good or bad idea?).
by Henry Farrell on January 8, 2006
I’ve been reading Hendrik Hertzberg’s “Politics: Observations and Arguments” (Powells , Amazon ) over the last couple of days, and I’m greatly taken by it – witty and intelligent political journalism. I was particularly taken with his coined term, the “expectorate,” which refers to those “journalists, consultants and spin doctors,” (and today, one would presume, bloggers) who manipulate or present expectations about who is winning or losing in American politics. It deserves to be more widely known. Are there other coinages out there deserve wider circulation? Off the top of my head, I can think of Kim Stanley Robinson’s term ‘mallsprawl’ – much catchier and more evocative than the anodyne and uninformative “Edge City”, but scarcely known to the wider public. Philip K. Dick’s ‘kipple,’ junk that seems to reproduce itself, has done somewhat better (it has a Wikipedia entry), but not as well . Any others?
by Henry Farrell on December 22, 2005
Kevin Drum reads this Washington Monthly article on Kos, and says that we need more wonkishness in the leftwing blogosphere. Duncan Black disagrees.
bq. there’s just little point in detail-oriented grand policy proposals when Bush and Republicans are in office. Just about everything their side offers up involves tax cuts, corporate pork, or cuts to programs that help keep granny from freezing to death in winter. The rest are complete disasters for obvious reason, like the Medicare drug plan, and there’s really not much to discuss. If our team actually had some power we could be debating the merits of various universal health care proposals, or considering just how large a minimum wage increase might be appropriate, or various other wonky things.
I think this misses the point. Not only is a certain amount of wonkishness on the left a good thing in itself, but it can be an important political weapon. Looking back to the Social Security debate, left-of-center blogs played a real role in helping to torpedo Republican proposals – but it wasn’t only the Cossacks (or even Josh Marshall’s information-gathering campaign to separate the sheep from the goats) that did the trick. Wonkish critiques of the bogus figures and rationales that the administration was floating helped shift the public debate from one about a purportedly necessary and inevitable reform, to one about a political ploy that looked like backfiring. More to the point – one of the reasons that Republicans seem to have a dealers’ edge in politics these days is that the terms of debate have been shaped by right-wing talking points emanating from the AEI, Heritage etc. A politically savvy wonkishness is an essential part of the long campaign to claw back some of this lost ground. You can make a pretty good case that the Democratic party, and the left more generally, has done a lousy job in connecting wonkish proposals together into a coherent political agenda for change, but it seems to me that that’s a different argument altogether.