Ένα εξαιρετικό βιβλίο που συνιστώ είναι το “Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press” του Eric Boehlert. Έχει ιδιαίτερο ενδιαφέρον για όσους αναρωτιούνται αν όσοι έχουν έντονη παρουσία στα ηλεκτρονικά μέσα είναι και συγκεκριμένου προσανατολισμού. Γιατί είναι τόσο δυνατές οι φιλελεύθερες φωνές στο διαδίκτυο;
Μερικά χαρακτηριστικά αποσπάσματα:
Chronicling the 1972 presidential campaign, Timothy Grouses land-
mark book, The Boys on the Bus, exposed how the political press re-
ally functioned, and in the proccss he helped give birth to modern-day
journalism. With a sharp eye for detail and an outsider’s disdain for con-
formity, the young Rolling Stone writer explored how a handful of su-
premely confident, cigarette-smoking and bad-tie-wearing journalists who
rode the back of campaign buses (and airplanes) were really the ones who
framed the story—who set the agenda—for the unfolding White House
race.
Dishing healthy doses of gossip and painting compelling character
sketches, while also bluntly critiquing their campaign work, Crouse de-
tailed the rise of “pack journalism” and the incestuous press culture that
fueled it: “They all fed off the same pool report, the same daily handout,
the same speech by the candidate; the whole pack was isolated in the same
mobile village.”
For most readers who had never given much thought to the (mostly)
male band of reporters behind the news, and who couldn’t name more
than one or two Beltway journalists, Crousc’s insider account came as a
revelation. Published at a time when political journalists didn’t seek out
porting and ushered in the notion of journalists as newsmakers them-
selves. In fact, Crousc’s book helped make media stars of a whole
generation of influential insiders who for decades afterward maintained a
viselike grip on crafting Beltway conventional wisdom, insiders like Da-
vid Broder of the Washington Post, Jack Germond of the Baltimore Sun,
and the legendary reporter Johnny Apple of the New York Times.
Back in 1972 the key to getting the story right, to capturing the cam-
paign, was being on the bus. “Because travel is the soul of this busi-
ness,” Apple told Crouse. “You gotta be there because you can’t do it all by
telephone.”
But over time the bus morphed into a bubble as campaign operatives
increasingly limited access to candidates, and even to senior aides, to the
point where the bus riders became among the least well-informed about
the days unfolding developments. With the arrival of the Internet age,
the bus looked more and more like a horse and buggy.
Describing a surreal scene of approaching antiquity during the 2008
campaign, as journalists filed dispatches from a Barack Obama rally,
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post wrote, “Before the Democratic
nominee took the podium, the text of his speech arrived by BlackBerry.
The address was carried by CNN, Fox and MSNBC. While he was still
delivering his applause lines, an Atlantic blogger posted excerpts.”
The outdated campaign bus had broken down. Worse, over the years
not only had its media passengers slavishly maintained the same pack-
driven approach that Crouse bemoaned decades earlier, but the political
press had become increasingly unserious, with an almost nonstop devo-
tion to campaign tactics, process, and trivia.
Fed up, liberal bloggcrs adopted the Internet as their bus. Fueled by
high-speed cable modems, they didn’t claim to be objective or to uncover
the insider, tactical minutiae that the mainstream media obsessed over.
But during the 2008 race, by communicating directly with their audience
and deputizing their readers (“the people formerly known as the audi-
ence,” as the blogger Jay Rosen put it), bloggers helped democratize the
process by sapping the mainstream media of some of its previous, oracle-
like control over the campaign narratives. The Internet, as Barack Obama
demonstrated in 2008, offered a way for candidates to go around the tra-
ditional Beltway media and communicate directly with voters.
During the White House run, the blogs created user-generated content
that periodically altered the course of the campaign. They forccd two tele-
vised debates to be canceled, infuriating Fox News in the process. They
vetted Sarah Palin better than the GOP had. They pushed back against
shoddy journalism and unleashed blogswarms on offensive cable com-
mentators who diminished Democratic candidates. And they bedeviled
the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain, at nearly every turn, using
an array of online tools to contuse the slow-footed candidate whose Re-
publican Party, still in love with AM talk radio, seemed oblivious to the
political revolution unfolding online.
The recent rise of the liberal blogosphcrc, or the nctroots, as its also
known, has unfolded at an extraordinary pace. “Already, the nctroots arc
the most significant mass movement in U.S. politics since the rise of the
Christian right more than two decades ago,” marveled Jonathan Chait in
the pages of the centrist New Republic magazine. “What they have accom-
plished in just a few years is astonishing.” Indeed, by late 2008 the reader-
ship at the flagship liberal site Daily Kos was roughly equivalent to that of
America’s most-read newspaper, USA Today.
Bill Clinton cleared his calendar to host a private, two-hour lunch at
his Harlem office with prominent liberal bloggers just prior to his wife’s
White House campaign push. And the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein was
called on to ask a question at Barack Obama’s first presidential press con-
fcrcncc in February 2009. A political and media transformation was un-
folding in plain sight.
That’s how the progressive blogosphere was born. Creative people like
Bowers were drawn to it because it represented a much-needed release
valve for the pent-up political frustration so many Democrats and lib-
erals had felt throughout the late 1990s and into this decade. For them,
blogs represented small-scale places where people could stand up to the
onslaught of conservative misinformation that had fueled Bill Clinton’s
impeachment, the Florida recount in 2000, and the rush to war with
Iraq. It was where citizens could at least try to launch a new form of par-
ticipatory democracy online. At first they just blogged in hopes of retain-
ing their sanity as they watched the Bush Doctrine unfurl and liberals
being attacked as unpatriotic while the government cut taxes on its most
wealthy citizens and waged a costly, unprecedented war over nonexistent
WMDs.
‘Ihe liberal blogosphere, made up of lots of funny-sounding anchors—
Firedoglake, Hullabaloo, FiveThirtyEight, the Field, AmericaBlog, Shakes-
ville, Eschaton, Crooks and Liars, Suburban Guerrilla—represents perhaps
the most unplanned, un-thought-through media and political movement
in modern America. Liberal bloggers changed politics and the press in a
way that no other left-leaning movement had done in decades. But it really
did just happen.
Early on, the netroots movement was built with very little coordination
and no money. There were no memos, no outlines, no projections, and
certainly no budgets. No nothing. (Only later did coordination begin to
surface.) It grew organically and grew out of a deep-seated frustration
with the direction the country was taking. It became an accidental empire
as bloggers served as a conduit to the grassroots. The bloggers talked to
people who talked to people, and collectively they amassed real political
power by raising hell together.
It was an accidental empire because the pent-up dissatisfaction among
liberals just happened to peak at the exact moment the Internet knocked
down barriers of entry for public discussion. It was accidental because the
key players who helped bring the liberal blogosphere to life represented
the most unlikely cast of characters imaginable. Most brought with them
no experience in politics or journalism. None of them ever dreamed that
their online essays, posted in an effort to keep themselves sane, would ever
represent career options, or that White House candidates would one day
come courting.
Collectively, bloggers expanded well beyond the traditional role of
journalist or commentator; they tossed aside the mantle of objectivity that
the boys on the bus had worn for decades. Instead, bloggers raised money,
trained leaders, forged vibrant online communities, picked candidates,
fostered participation, forged coalitions among existing special interest
groups, launched policy initiatives, produced original reporting, called
bullshit out on the press, and occasionally, and out of sheer force of will,
attached a spine to the Democratic Party, which for much of the decade
had been too nervous, too spooked by the pro-war GOP, to acknowledge
its proud progressive past. They literally kept the lights on during a very
dark period. “Without the netroots, Democrats would not be in the posi-
tion we are in today,” U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced
after the Party’s sweeping congressional wins in 2006. “It’s as simple as
that.”
Many of the bloggers wrote better, more succinctly and more passion-
ately, than most high-paid newspaper columnists. They were more polit-
ically astute than TV s paid Beltway pundits, although they were rarely
invited to be part of the televised round-table discussions, and they were
just as powerful as labor leaders when it came to igniting key issues within
the Democratic Party. They even put on better presidential debates: the
blogger-sponsored candidate forum in 2007 turned out to be far more
substantive than any of the cable television debates that followed.
Growth and influence came at an astonishing clip. Four years earlier,
desperately trying to push Sen. John Kerry across the White House finish
line, the nascent blogosphere represented the campaign oddity, the pro-
verbial new kids with their newly minted press credentials and their lap-
tops stuck up in the nosebleed section at the Democratic National
Convention in Boston. By 2008 they starred as a main attraction. Camped
out inside the bloggcrs-only Big Tent, a two-story, corporate-sponsored
8,000-foot pavilion just blocks from the Convention in downtown Den-
ver, hundreds of bloggers chilled on couches in the New Media Lounge,
watched news updates on flat-screen TVs, and feasted on free WiFi, back
massages, smoothies, and beer while CBS’s Katie Couric came by with a
camera crew to interview them.
Sure, arch enemy Bill O’Reilly still compared liberal bloggers to the Ku
Klux Klan and the Nazi Party. (Bloggers chuckled every time he did.) But
O’Reilly was probably just angry that so many conservative bloggers,
blinded by their pursuit of half-baked conspiracy theories over the years,
had failed to emerge as a political force on their own. After all, the goose
chases related to Barack Obama—he was born in Kenya!—took up
months of the bloggers’ time in 2008. There was simply nothing on the
Right that matched the passion, or the proven results, of the liberal net-
roots.
Indeed, beginning on November 3, 2004, the day after Bush won re-
election, the nctroots became focused on electing a Democratic president.
For four years the blogs worked toward that goal. “In their role as a cen-
tral conduit of political information and opinion, they will calibrate,
amplify, and disseminate the messages and themes that shape people’s be-
liefs and bolster their convictions, providing the impetus for organizing,
fundraising and GOTV [getting out the vote],” wrote the netroots guru
Peter Daou. “And on November 4, 2008, eight long years of doing battle
against the excesses of the Bush presidency will come to a triumphant
conclusion.”
A triumph, yes, but the White House campaign also revealed deep
growing pains in the liberal blogosphere. The rupture emerged during the
Democratic primary season, when the normally tightly knit community
was torn apart by a venomous civil war between online supporters of Ba-
rack Obama and those of Hillary Clinton. The months-long showdown
left deep, lasting scars, especially among some netroots veterans, who were
aghast at the sexist language lobbed at Clinton from within the progres-
sive community.
Flexing all kinds of new muscles built up between 2004 and 2008, the
netroots did everything it could to get Obama and Democrats elected:
Media Matters for Amcrica played the role of relentless watchdog; the
Huffington Post built a gigantic bulletin board; the all-star think tank
sponsored by the Center for American Progress critiqued Republican
policies; and ActBlue served as the money hub for candidates. A new gen-
eration of creative operatives enthralled by the historic possibilities of
Obama’s run was fostered and promoted. But Obama himself often failed
to return the online love. Bloggers, even the majority of Obama sup-
porters, had to wrestle with the nominees standoffishness toward the nct-
roots and its love of unambiguous progressive politics. Embracing the
campaign rhetoric of bipartisan unity, Obama’s team focused more on the
revolutionary fund-raising and Faccbook-stylc social-nctworking possi-
bilities the Internet held, and less on the brand of scrappy liberal politics
the blogosphere embraced.
That political disconnect prompted some painful introspection through-
out the campaign and into Obamas early days as president. Had the blogo-
sphere simply been cast aside by a new team of centrist Democrats? Had
bloggers tailed to secure a pledge from Obama that he’d govern as a liberal
before showering him with support, before giving him the netroots en-
dorsement, during the primary season?
It’s impossible to know whether the 2008 campaign represented the
netroots’ pinnacle in terms of passion and influence, or if it has lasting
power and this election season was just the first of many when liberal
bloggers will forcefully help to shape the parameters of political debate.
What is clear is that in 2008 bloggers took the campaign bus down a very
different route.