The Politics of Blogs

In Sunday’s Book Review, Richard Posner had a long article on blogs and the media. (Just so Rana doesn’t yell at me, the following discussion of blogs refers ONLY to the political blogs and not to other related blogs which are not only vast in number, but worthy in content.)

When political scientists talk about blogs, they usually make one of the following arguments:
1. Blogs are important, because they influence key individuals in the media and in elected office. The bloggers indirectly influence political events and shape opinion. Even bloggers with small traffic numbers can have an impact as their best posts are linked to by those with higher traffic numbers. See Drezner and Farrell and the Pew study (link later).
2. Blogs are important, because they are another venue for people to participate in politics either through comments or through blog authorship. See McKenna and Pole (link later).
3. Blogs are important, because they are a destructive force on American democracy. They polarize discussion and further remove individuals from community and traditional political affairs. See Sunstein and Putnam.
4. Blogs are important, because they offer a competing point of view to the mainstream media. An alternative voice that outs bias and errors. In a single bound. See Reynolds, Hewitt, and millions of others.

Posner made the blogging/media argument, which is good, because even though there are a lot of people in that 4th category, Posner makes some excellent points.

Posner rejects the notion that blogs and online discussion have resulted in polarizing politics, because the medium provides anonymity and isolates people from different voices. Posner says that polarization has occurred, but for a different reason. Polarization has occurred because the number of outlets for speech have increased from three news channels to thousands with cable and the blogs. Just as political views are more moderate in a two party state than in a multiparty state, that’s why things were more civil in the old days of media.

The current tendency to political polarization in news reporting is thus a consequence of changes not in underlying political opinions but in costs, specifically the falling costs of new entrants. The rise of the conservative Fox News Channel caused CNN to shift to the left. CNN was going to lose many of its conservative viewers to Fox anyway, so it made sense to increase its appeal to its remaining viewers by catering more assiduously to their political preferences.

But Posner is not one to dwell on the negative. In fact, it’s not clear that he sees polarization as a negative. Because he’s pumped up about this blogging thing. (and who can blame him)

Bloggers are specialists. And bloggers thus can specialize in particular topics to an extent that few journalists employed by media companies can, since the more that journalists specialized, the more of them the company would have to hire in order to be able to cover all bases. A newspaper will not hire a journalist for his knowledge of old typewriters, but plenty of people in the blogosphere have that esoteric knowledge, and it was they who brought down Dan Rather. Similarly, not being commercially constrained, a blogger can stick with and dig into a story longer and deeper than the conventional media dare to, lest their readers become bored. It was the bloggers’ dogged persistence in pursuing a story that the conventional media had tired of that forced Trent Lott to resign as Senate majority leader.

Blogging is accurate. What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

Blogging is organic. …In effect, the blogosphere is a collective enterprise – not 12 million separate enterprises, but one enterprise with 12 million reporters, feature writers and editorialists, yet with almost no costs. It’s as if The Associated Press or Reuters had millions of reporters, many of them experts, all working with no salary for free newspapers that carried no advertising.

UPDATE: More from Jack Shafer and Dan Drezner.