January 12, 2005

Josh Claybourn at In the Agora: Blogging About Blogging brings up something that's been bothering me, too:

I've written before that I really don't like blogging about blogging because the whole thing seems "incestuous and self-serving." I understand that it's necessary at times and to some degree it helps build a community in blogging. But I think this sort of thing should be kept to a minimum. It's a bit like journalists doing stories about journalists. Eventually they need to report news, and the more they focus on news the better. Similarly, I'm usually only interested in analysis, entertainment/humor, and information from websites, not who's doing a better job of rigging link rankings. Besides the uselessness of the activity, I sometimes question the motives behind those who do it. Are they truly interested in blogospheric developments, or are they actually trying to build friendships and aliances in order to increase their own power? After all, the surest way to get a link from someone is to first link to them.

I certainly don't intend to condemn "blogging about blogging" in all forms, because as I said already, it can be useful. But I fear that it's manifesting itself a bit too much. In fact, there's a whole category of blogs - metablogs - devoted solely to talking about what other blogs are doing. After a while the internet starts to feel like an echo chamber. Famed radio host Hugh Hewitt is slowly turning his site into a metablog, and I've noticed Joe Carter doing it a lot recently as well. I suppose Hugh's focus is a bit understandable, given that he's promoting a new book of his about Blogs. Thanks for the introspection, but let's move on to substance and humor.

I agree with Josh completely both about blogs in general and Hugh Hewitt in particular.
Blogging about blogging has always been a pitfall which I noticed when I began blogging almost 3 years ago and then there were only a few hundred thousand or so blogs and Rathergate, and the key role blogs would play in it, were in the future.
It is only too easy, tempting and fun to get "lost" in the blogosphere.
There are lots of fine bloggers out there and only 24 hours in a day--as fast as I read, I can't read them all.
And, as Josh says, there's the need to focus on the news, which can break quickly and furiously.
What he forgets to mention, but I'm sure he's thinking it, is that we're also at war and this, above all, is the salient fact to keep in mind.
Rathergate is a small victory, as Michelle Catalano would say, but it is a victory of that war as CBS News attempted to unseat with this non-story our wartime President who is pursuing the war against the terrorists steadily and aggressively.
There are many other battles left to fight, even on this front with the 5th column Leftist MSM:
the NYSlimes, the WashingtoncomPost, AP, AFP, the BBC and Al-Reuters stage mini-Rathergates all day, every day with the bias in their "news."
The media has, either purposefully or by happenstance, joined forces with our IslamoNazi enemy and are actively working to stop our war effort, using the power of the press to do as much damage to our troops, our President and his Administration and our country itself and what it stands for as they can.
Almost every blogger seems to have forgotten that not only was fired CBS News exec Mary Mapes behind the bogus Bush TANG story, but she was also behind the Abu Ghraib "abuses" story.
(In yet another stroke of irony, Sgt. Graner, the supposed "ringleader" of the Abu Ghraib guards, is on trial at Ft. Hood this week and he seems ready to maintain that he didn't abuse or torture the detainees at all, but followed instructions to deal with hostile, foreign (not-Iraqi) suspected Islamist murderers captured on the battle front.)
We are at war with men and women who are trying to kill us with the sanction of their religion and its holy men, yet the MSM would have us believe that we should be at war with America itself and that, really, the terrorists are right--our way of life must be wiped off the face of the earth.

My beef with Hugh Hewitt is that he has become way too lordly about blogging, especially on his radio show, as if he invented blogging and is now its monarch.
Last night, a Freeper (Free Republic denizen) called the show to tell him that he'd set up a blog because of Hugh's advocacy of the--dare I say it?--medium.
Hugh practically berated him and said that unless and until the guy had read his book on blogging, he couldn't and shouldn't blog and exhorted him to follow everything the book said to do.
This undermines the whole spirit of blogging, which is that of the individuality, personal spirit and freedom of the blogger himself (or herself), writing without the constraints of an editor, boss or even hostile peers.
To his credit, Glenn Reynolds, the Blogfather of a great many of us, including me, has never taken an imperious or bossy attitude about anyone's blog and for that I admire, respect and laud him greatly.

To return to the blogging about blogging, which has been particularly virulent of late, there also comes the tendency to do too much back patting, high 5-ing and self-congratulation due to the soft bomb of the CBS panel report released this week and the attendant firings that was clearly the result of supreme blogging by several great bloggers like Powerline and LittleGreenFootballs.
To them goes the glory, but the sweet smell of success is heady stuff and we all wanted to be a part of it, share the joy and join in the fun and I'm no exception.
All of sudden, people who've never heard of blogs want to know a blogger, read them like crazy or start one or all three.
Blogging is now, officially, cool.
But being a member of the Pajamahadeen is tough, hard and often thankless work--not all weeks will be heady and triumphant like this week.
There's a lot of work that lies ahead of us.
A lot of work.
This war isn't won yet and won't be won, even on the battlefield, if it's not won also in the media on TV and in the papers.
To cite just one instance, Wretchard of Belmont Club documented the "lucky" appearance of AP photographers in Baghdad when the "insurgents" murdered 3 Iraqi election officials in cold blood.
Those journalists just "happened" to be there at the right time and gave the story lots of air time, while other "good" stories about helpful and heroic American troops and America-friendly Iraqis hungry for freedom went unreported and ignored.
This is typical of the war coverage we've been getting from most of the 4th estate everyday for the last 18 months.
We'll know that we've won our war with the MSM when the Islamist enemy is called what it is and no longer dubbed "insurgents" or "militants."
We'll know that we're starting to win the war when we don't see stories like Abu Ghraib that not only undermine the President, the Secretary of Defense and our fine men and women in uniform, but that give the bad guys the benefit of the doubt ("they're innocent until proven guilty in an American court of law.") or that give their jihad moral equivalence to our just war response.
President Bush's cousin involved in power journalism, John Ellis, has some similar advice for bloggers regarding the Rathergate circle j*rk (Pardon this crudity, but it's the only description that fits!) and its aftermath:

One Last Thing.

The CBS "Panel" Report was a gem, in its lawyerly way, and well worth the wait. Since a number of you emailed to ask for Ellisblog's view, here's my ten cents:

1. Andrew Heyward must have had one good lawyer. How else to explain the apparent success of what might be called his Reverse Nuremberg defense. Or as Kaus put it: Heyward was just giving orders. Then he went to lunch. My guess is that Heyward will be "resigned" later; that the decision to keep him was tactical.

2. Dan Rather really is a pompous fool. You already knew that.

3. The blogosphere needs to get a grip. I'm not sure which was more pathetic, bloggers posting their phone numbers for "media interviews" or all the bloviating about "whitewash" and "cover-up." Memo to bloggers: (1) we don't care if you're on TV and; (2) The report is the most scathing indictment of the standards and practices of CBS News ever published, by anyone at anytime (with the possible exception of Renata Adler's work on the Westmoreland vs. CBS case).
[What is doubly ironic about this is that more than one respectable Conservative blogger has expressed far too much glee about blogs now getting the respect they deserve, a la the Godfather--or is it Rodney Dangerfield?, from the MSM. This phone number for TV interviews phenomenon is part of it.
This is a potential trap with 2 doors--With one victory, bloggers risk becoming the love-hungry minions of the very media machine they've just tried to take down.
Also, there's the risk that by wooing the blogosphere--such as the Time Magazine "award" for Blog of the Year to Powerline--the MSM can woo, win and then subdue the maverick citizen journalist bloggers who are making life difficult and non-productive for them.--Jen]
Stop preening and stop whining.

4. What did they think they were being called for, a strategy session? When the fearsome foursome was ordered to report to CBS News Headquarters at 8am on Monday morning, they were apparently surprised to learn that they were being fired. I'm told these aces of investigative journalism believed that Mapes would buy the bullet and everyone else would be spared. Hello? Out in the real world, the only question was whether Heyward would be fired on the day of the report's release or a couple of months later. Disconnected from reality is a weird place to be for people who claim to be "plugged in."

5. No evidence of political bias. This was the only major short-coming of The Panel's report, since everyone in the real world (and especially the political world) knew and knows that CBS News was gunning for President Bush big time. It was an open secret in August that the DNC and the media would re-raise the TexANG service issue immediately following the Labor Day weekend. Indeed, Ben Barnes was telling people over the summer that CBS would take the lead in that attack.

I was asked about this point blank at a pre-GOP convention election briefing that I did for a major NYC financial services firm. Specifically, I was asked: Do you think the story (amazingly similar to the one that appeared on CBS News Sixty Minutes Two) is true and do you think it will be harmful to the President's re-election hopes? To which I replied: I can't believe that CBS News would bet its credibility on Ben Barnes. (Talk about disconnected from reality!)
[One of the high points of the break in the Rathergate non-story was when Barnes's own daughter called Conservative radio station WBAP in Dallas to say that her own father was indeed a liar and that he was lying about Bush!--J.T.]

I think The Panel understood that there was a lot of back-channel stuff (between CBS News and the Kerry campaign and the DNC and the like) going on, but that to delve into it would have required a much larger inquiry. Which was not what they had been contracted to do. So they punted. It would have been better had they avoided the bias issue altogether. Too bad they didn't, but really, so what?

6. Colonel Hackworth. Pages 95 and 96 of the report are simply brilliant.

7. How Evil is Mary Mapes? Don't ask me. Ask her colleagues, present and former.

And I have one final thing to add to Ellis's: No discussion of Rathergate should be had without mention of its distaff story--the Swifties and their treatment by the MSM and the devasting effect they had on the Kerry campaign.
Everything that could be said about Rathergate was the exact opposite in the Swift Boat Veterans's case--everything they said was true and was backed up by facts, there were 260 living witnesses among them and they weren't "politically partisan."
These fine men--which included a group of POWs who were held for years in North Vietnam and tortured because of what John Kerry said in Congress--merely wanted to have their say about the unsuitability of Kerry to be Commander-in-Chief, especially in wartime, based on what they'd seen him do and say in the Vietnam War.
Yet, when they did get their story on the air or in the press (and most of the time, they did not), they were vilified as partisan Bushie liars and slanderers.
Miraculously, Kerry managed to get through the campaign without releasing his military or medical records to disprove what the Swifties were saying--because he couldn't-- or without addressing the charges they levelled but it meant that he never held a press conference with the media again after the Swifties came forward.
So, no, our work isn't done and the War isn't won.
Stop the whining and preening and blog on.
Rathergate is one small victory and we should all be proud and satisfied as Conservative warbloggers, but let's not win this battle and then lose the war.
With the Inauguration next week and then the Iraqi election at the end of the month and everything that happens in between and thereafter, we should all be too busy chronicling the rest of the war to do any more preening, whining or bloviating about the obvious bias of CBS News and Dan Rather.