Al Giordano posted a fascinating and insightful commentary on the blogosphere and McCain's "war on the media" that should sound a very loud cautionary note to all of us at DailyKos who want to see an Obama presidency.
...in recent days, too many bloggers and their commenters have aped the worst qualities of the commercial media in such a way as to allow the McCain campaign and the far right to lump us in with the reviled commercial media to make us, too, the receptacle of that public hatred.
It's about the "unvetted diaries," stupid.
Follow me over the fold to an analysis of what we are doing wrong and how we can stop helping McCain in his war on the media and the struggle to gain control of the narrative.
On September 3, Giordano writes:
What members of the national media don't understand - what they have never understood - is why "running against the media" is such a good strategy.
Most members of the commercial media don't want to face what everybody else knows - that as institutions go, that of "the media" is as hated or more so than George W. Bush and the US Congress.
Unfortunately, in recent days, too many bloggers and their commenters have forgotten that truth, too.
Bloggers, in general, claim to understand just how much the public distrusts the media. We bloggers have been "running against the media" from the get-go. It's one of the biggest keys to our success: that readers turn to us instead of the commercial media it distrusts. The one thing that could most rapidly destroy that for us would be if we became, in the public's mind, associated with the same sloppy arrogance which it associates with the media.
That ought to be a no brainer. But in recent days, too many bloggers and their commenters have aped the worst qualities of the commercial media in such a way as to allow the McCain campaign and the far right to lump us in with the reviled commercial media to make us, too, the receptacle of that public hatred.
Yesterday a comment on one of the many man Palin diaries pointed out that there were 3,800+ diaries on Palin since the VP pick was announced. I was stunned. I was even MORE STUNNED to do my own keyword search and find that the number had grown to over 4,000 between the time of that comment, and my own keyword search.
Giordano goes on at length about how fighting a war on the media is a potentially winning strategy for McCain.
But only if progressive bloggers continue to aid him.
One piece of required reading for looking at the electorate and the battle for the White House is Paul Krugman's NYT op-ed last week, The Resentment Strategy..
The salient point of Krugman's piece is here:
the Republican Party, now more than ever, is firmly in the hands of the angry right, which has always been much bigger, much more influential and much angrier than its counterpart on the other side.
What’s the source of all that anger?
Some of it, of course, is driven by cultural and religious conflict: fundamentalist Christians are sincerely dismayed by Roe v. Wade and evolution in the curriculum. What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception — generally based on no evidence whatsoever — that Democrats look down their noses at regular people.
And further on:
What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of Nixon.
Irrational, hypocritical, subjective, and potent: the anger of the right.
Now look at Giordano's comments on what is consolidating the Republican base and energizing the opposition:
Hatred of the media is a real force in American life; the secret and only scapegoat that the media can't offer up to the crowd as ritual sacrifice is itself. In a very meaningful way, the media are more intrusive in the daily lives and emotions of the American public than government. A family might be suffering because a parent is ill without health care, or a son or daughter might come back from Iraq gravely wounded (or might not come home at all), but coping mechanisms are such that people deal with hardships, move on, and even in the worst of situations find closure or adapt with coping mechanisms.
The dynamic with the media is different. Like other addictions or "negative pleasures" the media never offer any closure, but, rather, just the constant drip, drip, drip of distracting noise which, paradoxically, we invite into our living rooms and bedrooms even as it offends us daily. There is a dysfunctional relationship between the media and the citizenry that is akin to battered spouse syndrome: they beat us down, tell us we're worthless, invade the privacy of people just like us, and yet we turn and keep the TV and radio (and, yes, the Internet) on even through social and family gatherings. They are babysitter to our kids and live-in nurse to our elders, the guests that won't leave and that we love to hate and gossip about.
Yet as in any other dysfunctional relationship, our resentment grows and sometimes hits a boiling point.
It is that boiling point the McCain campaign is trying to conjure up for Governor Palin's speech tonight.
The risk we run, as bloggers trying to energize and support a critically-needed change in Washington, is feeding this beast of right-wing resentment and anti-intellectualism with shoddy research, gossip-mongering, distractions, wailing and unsubstantiated attacks upon the candidates, and focus on the issues, the candidate, and a narrative that will keep the pressure on.
But the larger question here at DKOS, when looking at the littered field of no-content teeth-gnashing diaries, unsubstantiated accusations, finger-pointing anger and downright moose-shooting hostility is what I would sum up as
"What's your motive?"
Are you venting? Are you working to get Obama elected? Are you lashing out due to frustration at watching the same old Rovian machine leap into action to try to Swiftboat Obama back into the memories of the lost campaigns of Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry? Giordano says it best:
And, excuse me, but the justifications I've been hearing - "too bad about that kid, but we have to jump on the child pregnancy as a teaching tool for sex education," or, "the Alaska Independence Party will be seen as a terrorist organization to which Palin belongs" or "but if Obama's kid, or Chelsea Clinton, was pregnant the racists would do the same" - are as lame as lame can be. They are devoid of the most important context of all: does repeating such claims help win an election? Or does it weaken and distract in ways that invite defeat?
And this will happen again and again - giving the McCain campaign more fuel for its ploys to public sympathy as victim-of-the-media - until bloggers stop repeating and linking to (and "reccing") unvetted claims and begin to vet each other's claims with the same vigor and aggressiveness that we insist McCain should have done with his VP pick. Bloggers that state undocumented claims as fact deserve the same scorn and ridicule as any other member of the media when doing so. We have been far too soft on the most counter-productive and slothful colleagues in our own ranks. And yet we have already perfected the "smackdown" skills to clean up such messes in our comments sections and the overall Netroots. The hour has come to deploy them.
Sure, you have a right to vent. Sure, you have a right to express your frustration, wail about a blip in the polls, yell from the rooftops "THEY ARE LYING THEY ARE LYING!"
But what's your motive?
Do you wish to invite defeat?
I know that I don't. And I have taken one simple step to reduce the amount of McCain-camp trolling on DailyKos. First of all, when you see a provocative gossip diary, click on the UID. Look at the diarist's history and find out if they are a serious blogger doing a serious piece that adds something to the narrative or informs the community.
Diaries to avoid: First or second time diaries from those who have NEVER COMMENTED, or whose diaries consist mainly of concern trolling, hand-wringing, or repeating McCain talking points, as well as just plain unsubstantiated gossip with no references, no quotes, and no links. It is easy to pass by the chaff if you know what to look for.
Let's not give McCain's troll brigade what they want, and sink into a quagmire of cynical and impotent sniping.
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