Blogged Down

This article is reprinted from The American Prospect.

During one especially hectic week in mid-February, the Internet took three scalps in what appeared to be unrelated events. Liberal bloggers forced Talon News White House correspondent James D. Guckert, aka “Jeff Gannon,” to resign after it was revealed that he was writing under a false name for a Republican activist group (GOPUSA), that he was not really a journalist at all, and that he had posed nude on the Internet in an effort to solicit sex for money. Conservative bloggers, meanwhile, created a firestorm after Eason Jordan, the chief news executive for CNN, made controversial remarks during an off-the-record panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, suggesting that the U.S. military had targeted journalists in war zones. Jordan was forced to resign. Finally, in Maryland, Joseph Steffen, a longtime aide to Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich, was fired after reporters exposed him as the author of e-mails and anonymous web-site postings encouraging rumors about the marriage of Baltimore’s popular mayor, Martin O’Malley, a potential ’06 challenger to Ehrlich.

All unrelated stories, except for the Internet angle, right? Well, no. Scratch the surface and the same names turn up in each scandal, revealing the events of mid-February to have been part of an ongoing and coordinated proxy war by Republican political operatives on the so-called liberal media, conducted through the vast, unmonitored loophole of the Internet.

“Are bloggers journalists?” is a question that’s been kicking around for a few years, and both bloggers and journalists answer it by saying no. Journalists insist on the distinction because most bloggers don’t do original reporting or double-check information for its accuracy. Bloggers, for their part, often see themselves as polemicists and activists and chafe at being held to journalistic standards.

But these three episodes – combined with last year’s Dan Rather controversy, when conservative bloggers contributed mightily to the CBS anchor’s downfall – still represent something new. Not only are most bloggers not journalists; increasingly they are also partisan operatives whose agendas are as ideological as they come. Using the cover of anonymity (many bloggers use pseudonyms), the cacophony of the relatively new medium, and the easily inflamed passions of the web, these partisan political operatives are becoming experts at stirring up hornets’ nests of angry e-mails to editors, mounting campaigns to force advertisers to pull out of news shows, and, most disturbingly, spreading outright false information. The irony is that, at the same time this is happening, many in the mainstream media have decided it’s finally time to take bloggers seriously. But people who blog about politics and journalism aren’t just a 21st-century media story; they’re part of an ongoing political story with roots stretching back more than 40 years.

Blogging began around 1998, and slowly: Only 23 blogs were known to exist at the beginning of 1999. The practice really took off later that year, after several software programs were developed for the express purpose of setting up web logs (aka blogs), allowing even technophobes and Luddites to enter the fray. For blogs devoted specifically to politics, Sept. 11 was – as in so many other matters – a turning point, with political blogs proliferating throughout 2002. The first prominent ones were operated by independent actors – citizen-bloggers, if you will, indebted to no one and out to satisfy nothing more than their own creative urges. The medium, it turned out, filled a need, creating echo chambers and communities of the like-minded on both the left and the right, which felt that the mainstream media were biased against them.