SAN DIEGO — In 1998, retired Special Forces operators forced
CNN to apologize for a story alleging that American troops had used
nerve gas in Laos during a secret 1970 mission called Operation Tailwind. Although Special Forces alumni
responding to the story used Web-based technologies to communicate
with each other and with CNN, blogs did not then exist. Slandered
veterans could not talk with each other in real time, or expect
help from anyone outside their own circles. Nevertheless, these
experts in “force multiplication” succeeded in getting the story’s
producer sacked.
One year later, Pyra Labs added Blogger software
to the collection of Internet tools already on the market. Blogger
leveraged the increasing popularity of all things Web to make
“asymmetrical warfare” by non-journalists against inaccuracies in
Big Media easier than it had been before. Its debut set in motion a
chain of events that would eventually cause CBS News and its iconic
anchorman to come belatedly to grips with the idea that their own
credibility had gone the way of Jonathan Livingston Seagull: lost
in a painted sky, where the clouds are hung for the poet’s eye, and
the breaking news bites the network guy.
But Dan Rather’s comeuppance is just the latest in a string of
advances for “participatory journalism” that goes back to the
September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Thousands of people discussed
those attacks and their implications on the Internet, and more than
a few of these people either started blogs at that time or saw
their existing efforts come to sudden prominence.
The first old-media stalwart to feel the glare of the new
spotlight was British journalist Robert Fisk. Fisk had gone native
in his reflexive disdain for all things Western long before 2001.
But it was after 9-11 that the columns he wrote during the first
phase of America’s war on the Taliban and its terrorist
sympathizers received point-by-point refutation from popular
bloggers. Fisk was on the ground in Afghanistan with press
credentials. Despite that, every dispatch he filed seemed to spawn
informed rebuttal. Ken Layne, himself a journalist and one of the
people exasperated by Fisk’s transparent bias, famously quipped
that thanks to the Internet, “we can fact-check your ass.” Layne
and others made good on that boast, linking to Fisk’s original
writing and publishing annotated disputes with him on their
personal blogs. By December 2001, when Fisk wrote a self-loathing
reaction to his own mugging by a Muslim mob, his name had become
shorthand for the withering refutation that his columns
usually received.
Blogs and bloggers were not at that time trading lead guitar
licks with well-known Web pages or bulletin boards, but they filled
an important niche, like the rumbling bass under “Spirit in the
Sky” or the clink of the cowbell that jump-starts “Honky Tonk
Woman.”
THIS RELATIVE OBSCURITY was short-lived. By July 2002, a columnist
for the Arab News would complain that Wall Street Journal online
blogger James Taranto was doing in cyberspace what Arab nemesis
Ariel Sharon was doing on the ground. Later the same year, bloggers
scuttled Senator Trent Lott’s career by calling mainstream
attention to his fawning praise for even the segregationist parts
of an elderly colleague’s record.
When a young woman named Rachel Corrie was accidentally killed
by an Israeli bulldozer in March of 2003, bloggers like Charles
Johnson of LittleGreenFootballs could not keep the mainstream
media from eulogizing her as a peace activist despite her
incriminating diary entries and close ties to Palestinian
terrorists. A month later, however, bloggers helped debunk claims
of widespread carnage in Iraq by posting satellite photos that showed otherwise. When one
magazine writer called Baghdad “a landscape of death and
destruction, all stamped ‘Made in America,’” Glenn Reynolds shot
back, “Give it up, dude. This is the Internet — and now we can
fact check your ass from orbit.” Verification was done through
hyperlinks, search engines, and economies of scale rather than
controlling interest in reconnaissance satellites.
After the fall of Baghdad, New York Times columnist
Maureen Dowd used a dishonest ellipses to alter the meaning of a
presidential speech. Blogger Robert Cox was the first to note the deception
in Dowd’s May 14 column, and the blogosphere quickly held her
Pulitzer-Prize-winning feet to the fire. Dropping the inconvenient
parts of a quote became known as “Dowdifying” it.
A month before CBS and its Big Media cousins were reminded of
the difference between a pack and a herd, Jacob Sullum of
Reason magazine’s “Hit and Run” blog caught Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham
trying to dress before-the-fact speculation about the Republican
National Convention as after-the-fact reporting. The ensuing outcry
from bloggers and Harper’s subscribers alike forced Lapham
to apologize for his “silly” rhetorical trick.
Many recent stories about the impact of blogs on RatherGate have
been grudging in their admiration and fearful of what can happen
when the unwashed masses at computers in their pajamas dispense
with the checks and balances that brick-and-mortar newsrooms are
supposed to have. Careless talk about how bloggers edit themselves
contributes to this fear. In fact, bloggers don’t edit themselves;
they edit each other — and that’s even better.
FAR FROM BEING HIS or her own editor, every blogger is more
usefully understood as his or her own executive producer. What any
one person writes and publishes can be checked instantly by others.
This “distributed intelligence” is, as it turns out, a potent
weapon in the fight against received wisdom as documented by the
daily paper and in books by William McGowan (Coloring the
News), Heather Mac Donald (The Burden of Bad Ideas),
Bernard Goldberg (Bias), and Laura Ingraham (Shut Up
and Sing).
People living under authoritarian regimes seem to grasp this
potential more quickly than Americans do. It’s no wonder that a
recent poll found that Iranians trust the Internet more than any other medium. They may
perhaps know something we don’t.
Fortunately, the blogosphere is now a force to be reckoned with.
In the lonely cool before dawn, you hear their hard drives whirring
along, but when you get to the link they’re gone to the next thing.
In a world full of bias, they’re proving resistant to spin.
Bloggers will never replace full-time journalists or smart
columnists like Mark Steyn and James Lileks, but it takes more than face-melting
guitar solos from the professionals to cover most songs properly.
When the mainstream media finally get around to playing a different
tune, Dan Rather and his delusional allies will be out near the
Port-a-Potties with a tuba and a set of Uilleann pipes. Meanwhile,
on the main stage, bloggers have earned the right to step out from
behind supporting instruments and over to the keyboard. On songs
like “Thunder Road,” for example, the keyboard matters.
