So I've never done a diary entry before but I felt like sharing a little belated thought regarding Hugh Hewitt's notion of "black ops" blogging (brought to mind again by Salon's Right Hook column today).
Hewitt suggests that bloggers such as Kos or Atrios could, for all anyone knows, be Karl Rove plants, slyly building an audience of devoted liberal opinion followers, only to turn decisively against Kerry at a crucial moment in the campaign, thus wreaking great havoc for the Democrats, etc etc. Asks Hewitt: "Could Kos really be working for Rove? The costs of starting a blog are so low that the mischief potential is quite high ..."
This just struck me as a classic sort of conservative myopia. Hewitt believes such black opps are possible because the costs of a blog are so low. It doesn't occur to him that anything more than money goes into blog creation and blog readership, that Kos and Atrios are trusted because of their extensive records of thoughtful, fair-minded reporting and self-policing. Hewitt neglects to consider that the readers of blogs, on the whole, are capable of critical thinking, that they posess normal human judgment. He hasn't the slightest notion of what kind of interaction a blog is, what kind of intellectual relationship among people. To Hugh Hewitt, it is plausible that some conservative plant could produce vast streams of believable, top-notch liberal commentary, and that his readers would be willing, en masse, to turn on a dime and follow him in the opposite direction when the time comes.
Read More