In David Brooks' column, "Blogging his way to the top politically,"
it doesn't take any further reading than to the end of the second sentence to realize this is going to be a slam job. Actually, Brooks is conferring unstated recognition that Daily Kos is an unbridled force for change.
Brooks suggests Markos is Jimmy Dowd leading all the Mouseketeers in the proper way to think and sing the party line. He demeans Markos' chosen role in Democratic politics because Brooks fears a national trend is about to be demonstrated in the Connecticut primary; the Democratic party is reinventing itself through the grassroots. He collapses Markos and Daily Kos into an unrecognizable form driven to a cynical manipulation of the masses. In my own view, I can't believe Brooks has spent any time online to read the range of KOS diaries that crop up in the course of a week. There are reasons that Daily Kos is more powerful than Brooks suspects.
First, Daily Kos is living proof of how successful communications theory is.
When Diaries and threaded comments dissect a topic, an interesting group activity is taking place. Reports, articles, gossip, and logical deductions served up online have a purpose. It allows the group to address a social or political situation for which all participants have deep concern. The Diaries and threads allow the group to converge on what the likely truth of a situation is and to discard the propaganda, slogans, half-truths, opinions, elliptical statements, and disinformation in which the media coat reality.
Secondly, I know I'm not controlled by Markos, because I have my own set of prior knowledge, biases, and critical thinking filters to run the opinions expressed on Daily Kos through. I am older than Markos. He doesn't have my experiences dealing with the lies flowing from the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. When the NY Times cites a "Pentagon spokesperson," I always think the paper is playing a cute game by not rewriting the phase as "Military propagandist" or "Senior Disinformation Officer" to give the right twist to the Pentagon's spin.
Third, Brooks has no idea that Daily Kos is like an ant pile. We are spread out all over the world with our feelers detecting everything imaginable in politics, economics, sociology, psychology, medicine, and the sciences. These items get reported back to the nest.
More importantly, we have contributors who have specialized knowledge. These individuals break down complex information impacting our life and report it at length so that we can integrate it with our existing understandings and knowledge. There are links embedded in diaries that carry a reader to primary sources and essential secondary sources. About this form of critical reading, Brooks is ignorant and he should fear it, because when people become informed on a mass basis they make better decisions.
Many of us here online probably could do without newspapers except for the desire to keep up with the local news, weather, and obituaries; yet, noticeably, we see the news in the print medium is day old stale compared to what is read in DK. More importantly, Daily Kos allows us to see through the media slant given to the print articles and the ellipses they contain, especially in the opinion pieces in the NY Times.
Knowledge is power, Brooks. It works like an x-ray: we see right through you.