Katha Pollitt, writing on TPM Cafe, adds to something I wrote last week about blogs, political campaigns and the world of journalism in the wake of the Edwards/blogger fiasco.
As I said then, the blogosphere is a schizophrenic place, with many bloggers trying to function as political and partisan activists, political journalists and media critics all at once. The problem, however, is that the journalist and critic must remain independent, while the partisan activist is by nature and definition partisan.
These worlds collided in the Edwards campaign when the candidate hired the authors behind two lefty/feminist blogs — Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister — that use some salty and extreme language to make their points about the Christian right. The blogs are often sarcastic and bombastic, but funny and provide the kind of hard-headed lefty analysis missing from too many op-ed pages and cable new programs.
The controversy, it would seem, was inevitable from the moment they were brought on board. Edwards, after all, “is running for president, not king of the blogosphere.”
He wants — he needs — the votes of people who have never looked at a blog in their lives, who are deeply religious, culturally staid, and easily offended in about a thousand ways. Would those unemployed mill workers Edwards likes to talk about see Amanda’s “vulgarity” as populist and fun? or as smartypants elitism? How many Catholic undecideds think that joke about the Virgin Mary was funny and/or a sly critique of sexism in the church versus how many see it as rude and insulting, or would think so, after they’d heard it a thousand times thanks to William Donohue? It’s all very well to dismiss as outmoded people who respond poorly to obscenities and dirty jokes about religion. Fact is, there are a lot of them. A candidate would be out of his mind to alienate them over a staffing matter.
That said, the ultimate importance of the controversy was not whether Edwards was strong enough to stand up to the right or whether the campaign dissed the blogs. It is that it highlighted the problems that are likely to crop up more and more as the blogosphere grows and matures, creating more and more tension between its journalist/critic side and its partisan/activist side.
The blogosphere resembles, in many ways, the early days of the newspaper, when they were all partisan and biased and scandalous and read by the kind of people with which the elite wanted nothing to do.
For now, however, I’ll end this with a comment from Pollitt’s TPM post, a bit of advice to bloggers who value their independence:
To me, being a writer and being a political operative are very different things, and ought to remain so. A writer should be free to say what she believes, and the reader should know that the writer has that freedom. That is where the honor of a writer lies.The converse is, you can’t expect a politician, or the voters, to disregard your paper (or electronic) trail. They don’t care about your honor, they just want to get elected.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
The Cranbury Press Blog
E-mail me by clicking here.
Hank Kalet 