COMensarations
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The Power of the Blogs
Interesting observations on how the blogs are changing the way politicans are having to answer questions.
Glenn ’Instapundit‘ Reynolds, a.k.a. the BlogFather, has an interesting insight into a recent exchange between Paul ‘Powerline’ Mirengoff, another blogger, and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). In it he calls upon, i.e., links to, an article by Stephen Spruiell of National Review Online (NRO), which is another blog, albeit more like an online magazine.
The thrust of all this is that politicans are being kept on their toes by bloggers, who are more and more turning out to be people who know more about the subject they are asking questions about than your run-of-the-mill reporter, who has to be something of a jack-of-all-trades. The bloggers who are asking the questions tend to be more like subject-matter-experts. Not only that, but they are not particuarly beholden to any publisher, so they’ll more than likely speak their mind on the matter at hand.
This has its advantages as well as its disadvantages. The advantages are obvious; no higher-level management censoring their work so it’s more likely they’ll write exactly what they feel. Meanwhile the disadvantages are lurking in the wings. If they can’t write well, they’ll not get their point across. They could well irritate people to the point that very few will pay much attention to what they are saying. But that’s what anyone can expect in any situation. Another threat is that of misinformation. It’s true that many are working without the benefit of ‘editors’, such as traditional news organizations enjoy. However, over the last few years we’ve all seen some really outstanding examples of how having editors doesn’t seem to help much either. The Rathergate ‘fake but accurate’ scandal is one that springs immediately to mind. There have been several others since then that are equally interesting, albeit not as widely known.
Still and all, the Mirengoff v. Durbin incident is an interesting indicator of what I hope will be another tool to help people know what their politicans are up to and keep them accountable, as they should be, to the voters.
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