Blogosphere impact rising in politics
By Ben Milder
Harvard Political Review (Harvard U.)
01/03/2005

(U-WIRE) CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Until recently, conventional wisdom held that conservatives dominated the political corner of the Internet, led by sites such as the Drudge Report and InstaPundit.

However, with the recent rise of the innovative weblog, or "blog," format, which allows pundits to post links and commentary in real-time, updating multiple times each day, liberal bloggers such as Daily Kos and the Dean for America campaign helped energize the progressive movement online.

Indeed, last year, Daily Kos surpassed the conservative InstaPundit in monthly traffic, helping to prove that progressive blogs are now a media force with which to be reckoned.

BEYOND THE COMPUTER SCREEN

This growing Internet presence isn't just for fun, and its decentralization is no weakness.

"The [Gov. Howard] Dean campaign proved that you can raise millions of dollars without any party support," said Joe Trippi, who managed Dean's campaign for the Democratic nomination, in a recent HPR interview.

Indeed, the maverick presidential candidate raised over $40 million, primarily through the Internet, and in particular his own blog.

In the general election, many blogs focused on congressional races. Daily Kos alone raised over $500,000 for its favored candidates, such as Jeff Seemann, an underdog Ohio Democrat. Tim Tagaris, Seemann's communications director, told the HPR that without blogs the "campaign would never have gone as far as it did."

Indeed, without Daily Kos, Seemann would have lacked both fundraising and key personnel, since Tagaris himself was recruited from out-of-state after reading about Seemann online.

Although his campaign was not successful, Tagaris believes that web-based communications are a critical tool for connecting candidates with potential activists in the grass-roots. Trippi agrees, and in fact attributes much of the success of liberal bloggers and online fundraisers to the "bottom-up" style embraced by progressives, which he believes is well-suited to the Internet, which "thrives on decentralization."

FACT-CHECKING THE MAINSTREAM

Nonetheless, the reality is that blogs are only read by a tiny fraction of the public. However, Tagaris noted that bloggers can "push a story into the forefront and into the mainstream media," and act as a check on government when other media outlets are delinquent. Moreover, blogs can act as a "fact-checking mechanism" for the media itself — the controversy over the use of fake documents in a CBS story about President George W. Bush's Air National Guard service is only the most recent example, as bloggers were instrumental in fanning the story's flames.

Overall, bloggers are on constant alert for media biases and inaccuracies, and launch massive email-writing campaigns whenever necessary.

"We are finally starting to see some media types thinking seriously about the appropriateness of the current concept of objectivity," argued Matthew Yglesias, a blogger and writer for The American Prospect, in an interview with the HPR.

ARE THE PARTIES LISTENING?

Still, Trippi noted that neither Bush nor Sen. John Kerry came up with an effective blog. In Trippi's opinion, Kerry's was "too sterile" to foster a community, while Bush's blog didn't allow comments.

"If neither of the two parties understands that this bottom-up revolution is coming," Trippi argued, then perhaps a new candidate or party will emerge from the blogosphere. "One with hundreds of millions of dollars."

Tagaris concurred that the political potential of the Internet has yet to be seen. He argued that in the next few years "the blogosphere [will] run a campaign in open-source method," gathering supporters and funds from across the country and "distill[ing] that national enthusiasm efficiently down to the local level."

Today, blogs are treated by the mainstream media as a novelty, and have at best a niche audience. Yet if they continue to grow at their current pace, they could indeed someday succeed in their goal of making the media and even the entire political system more accessible to the average American.

Copyright ©2005 Harvard Political Review via UWire

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