Friday, December 15, 2006

You need to take things up one level of generality. Fact: the MSM reaches a whole lot more people than the blogosphere -- always has, always will (at least in the foreseeable future). Fact: getting the facts right in a story generally advances constructive discussion. Final Fact: political bloggers think that they offer at least something of value to political discourse (otherwise, why would anyone bother doing it). Put those three facts together, and the seeming contradiction you posit goes away. When the MSM screws something up, bloggers get upset because the screw-up, which reaches a lot of people, detracts from constructive discussion. (They may get particularly upset if the screw-up concerns the blogosphere -- this is the natural reaction when someone says something false about you rather than about something else.) They then do the natural thing -- they blog about it. And they may blog loudly about it, because that tends to be the only way to get anyone's attention given the blogosphere's limited reach. On the other hand, when the MSM invites bloggers in, bloggers are happy because it allows the bloggers to contribute whatever they have to add to the discussion in a medium that reaches a whole lot more people than blogging does.

So it's really not complicated. As I've said a bajillion times, bloggers are heavily dependent on the MSM. We (or at least I, and I think most of us) are not reporters, and we need reporters to tell us what's going on. We want them to do that accurately -- and of course they want that as well. I'll agree with you that the tone from both sides of this debate is sometimes unfortunate (and I don't excuse myself entirely from that charge), but at the end of the day I don't see anything all that "strange" or "awfully hard to reconcile" about this stuff.

Adam, I think I understand your point, but if I may say so, it was a little unclear in your original story. If the "MSM" as an institution is bad, then bloggers shouldn't care whether they've been, for example, mentioned in the paper.

I don't think, however, that anyone outside of a few zealots would say that the very concept of mainstream media is bad, though. Given that, it makes sense that bloggers -- myself included -- would misinterpret you.