Broadband Politics

Posted by Richard Bennett

Matt Welch coined the term “warblog” and helped make blogging a respectable activity in 2002, the Golden Age. He was one of the guys on everybody’s shortlist of must-read bloggers when the form broke out of its tender niche as a tool for web site designers to share diaries with each other and became a genuine media phenomenon (others were Ken Layne, Glenn Reynolds, Steve Den Beste, Jeff Jarvis, Bill Quick, Megan McArdle, Mindles Dreck, and Nick Denton.) So it’s a pretty big deal when he writes a farewell to warblogging and moves into the MSM fold, and we’re fortunate that he finds the time to explain his reasons:

Writing in the first full flush of the warblog explosion, I predicted this: “Some clever sonofabitch out there is going to tap into the vibrancy that Reynolds (and his readers & imitators) represent, and create one hell of a newspaper, magazine, website, and/or broadcast company for the New Era. I would scrub bathrooms for such an organization.”

Indeed, someone did tap into Reynolds (and Malkin, and 70 other high-profile bloggers), in the $3.5 million, pro–War on Terror collective known as Pajamas Media. But rather than blaze some new trail, the company stumbled badly out of the gate late last year, with a site chock full of wretched grammar, incoherent design (including an embarrassing name change from “Open Source Media,” after a different “Open Source Media” protested), and much wince-inducing wannabe-journalist jargon, such as “compiled by OSM staff in Barcelona.”

…Not only did I not scrub bathrooms for Pajamas, I ended up taking a job for that other ship “passing in the new media night” of my original essay, the opinion section of the Los Angeles Times. So where did I go wrong?

Matt hoped that a new form of publishing would give voice to the silent center not caught up in the partisan system of political labels and allegiances, and so did many of us. The prototypical warblogger was an “anti-idiotarian” who would fearlessly criticize spin doctors on both sides in a relentless search for truth. And indeed, this was the dominant voice in the blogosphere in 2002. In those days, people we now see as mind-numbingly partisan hacks (Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, and Charles Johnson for example) were readable and refreshing.

But now the blogosphere has been taken over by apologists for partisan causes, spin doctors, and profiteers: Atrios, Hugh Hewitt, Daily Kos, Michele Malkin, America Blog, Captain’s Quarters, Talk Left, Powerline, and the like. Where did it all go wrong?

In some sense it had to, because the 2002 warblog was a utopian enterprise and therefore destined to fail. People don’t have to time to approach politics issue-by-issue so we naturally fall back on party affiliation when other concerns are more pressing.

The discovery that money could be made serving up red meat to partisan loonies was a key turning point as well, and I thank Atrios for cementing that in the minds of the bloggers. Atrios is the father of Michele Malkin as a blogging phenom, ironic as that may be. I single him out of course because his was the first political blog to take shameful short-cuts around the truth in order to maintain a rabid atmosphere of Bush-bashing when others were trying to understand the president’s quaint approach to power. And what’s sauce for the goose is good for the goose-stepper.

And then there was Bush’s controversial decision to invade Iraq. More than anything else, this event created the rift among the warbloggers that sent them into warring camps. Warbloggers from both the left and the right supported the invasion of Afghanistan, viewing it as a rational response to 9/11, which it clearly was. But when Bush capitalized on public fearfulness to take care of some unfinished business in Iraq, his evident cynicism destroyed the warblogger consensus forged on naive optimism about America’s inherent goodness. It turns out we’re only as good as our leadership is competent.

So here were are, back where we were on 9/10. All in all, that may not be such a bad thing. Sure, we don’t want to be all complacent about our enemies and their intentions toward us, but we don’t want to start thinking that America the SuperCountry is directed by Divine Providence rather than the latest group of partisan hacks to descend upon Washington with their bag of tricks.

Finding that balance point was what warblogging was all about, and the surprising thing isn’t that it no longer works but that it once actually did.

UPDATE: And speaking of Pajamas Media, I see that their “science” blogger, Dean Esmay, is up to his vile old tricks regarding HIV and AIDS. More on that later, at this link.