According to a recent survey by Pew, blogging is not the future of the Internet. Younger online users are already moving away from it:
Blogging has declined in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006. Blog commenting has also dropped among teens.
14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006.
This decline is also reflected in the lower incidence of teen commenting on blogs within social networking websites; 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends' blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006.
By comparison, the prevalence of blogging within the overall adult internet population has remained steady in recent years. Pew Internet surveys since 2005 have consistently found that roughly one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.
Even if, in the short term, Americans over the age of 30 were able to compensate for the decline of blogging among Americans under the age of 30, over the long term it will not.
It is a pretty safe assumption that younger Americans who are currently turning away from blogs will turn back to the format when they age. It also seems safe to assume that the next generation of Internet users under the age of 30 are unlikely to turn to blogs at a higher rate than Americans currently under the age of 30. Those two assumed trends will eventually lead to a decline in blogging overall.
According to the same Pew survey, it appears that blogs will largely be replaced by social networking sites. At the risk of sounding old and crotchety, that is really too bad.
The rise of blogging over the past decade resulted in a significant shift of personnel with the national media hierarchy. Particularly in the realms of celebrity news and political news / commentary, large numbers of new public figures were able to rise to prominence without going through existing dominant institutions in those fields. Just take a quick look at the blogroll on Daily Kos for a rough look at the several dozen new, prominent, progressive public intellectuals. And that is just on the left-the right has also seen the rise of people like Michelle Malkin through blogging.
However, while blogs have created hundreds of prominent new voices in the national media, social networking sites like twitter have only reinforced the position of people and institutions who were already prominent in other media. Not a single person has risen to become a prominent national media figure just through their tweeting. However, popular TV shows, musicians, and politicians have gained two million followers or more through the medium.
Given this, it is a legitimate worry that the decline of blogging, and the rise of social networking, will mean that the media status quo that was once threatened by the Internet will now be reinforced by it. Rather than new media functioning as a democratizing force, it could become yet another tool of the status quo. Maybe once in a while it will be used by street demonstrators against a totalitarian regime, as it was in Iran, but most of the time it will just make the already famous and the already dominant even more so.
Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling says his polling shows the blogosphere is unrepresentative of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party:
You wouldn't know it from reading the blogosphere but liberal Democrats are actually pretty happy with the direction of their party right now. On our most recent national poll 76% expressed that sentiment.
Even though Open Left has pretty consistently offered criticism of the Democratic Party since its inception, and even though I am glad there are polling outfits like PPP to provide a valuable service, I still can't stand it when someone caricatures "the blogosphere."
The progressive political blogosphere is vast, has no clear boundaries, and quite literally involves millions of people. Don't stereotype.
Uh-oh for D.C. political writers: it looks like the Democratic retirements on Tuesday were actually a net positive for the Democratic Party's electoral chances. Colorado, too:
Now that Colorado Governor Bill Ritter has said he will step down rather than run for reelection, Democrats may be more competitive in this year's gubernatorial race. Ritter trailed former GOP Congressman Scott McInnis by eight points a month ago.
New Rasmussen Reports polling of likely Colorado voters shows that two of McInnis' potential Democratic opponents are a bit closer than that.
Three Democrats running for statewide re-election retied on Tuesday (a fourth Democratic retirement came from a Lt. Governor in Michigan seeking a promotion). The retirements in Colorado and Connecticut were helpful to Democratic causes, while the Democratic retirement in North Dakota was not. On balance, that makes so-called "Black Tuesday," almost universally defined as a negative for Democrats among D.C. political writers, a net positive for Democrats.
Of course, be wary when the first set of blind quotes you read from party strategists after a retirement is "[Fill in the blank's] decision may turn out to be a blessing." As we wrote above, that's probably true regarding Dodd.
And then, at the end of the same paragraph:
The fact is that retirements, party switches, etc. hurt a party -- period.
Yeah, retirements always hurt a party. PERIOD!!!!! Except that, at the start of this same paragraph, the author wrote that Dodd's retirement helped Dems. Awesome.
To put it in completely ungenerous terms, the claim that retirements are always bad for an incumbent party is just plain stupid. There are lots of cases where an incumbent retiring either is, or would be, good for the incumbent's party. Claiming otherwise is simply to cling to entirely qualitative, entirely fact-less, conventional wisdom rather than looking at the actual numbers.
Corruption cases are one obvious, glaring example that proves retirements can sometimes be good for an incumbent party. Take, for example, the Louisiana 2nd congressional district. There is no possible way Democrats would have lost that campaign in 2008 if the incumbent, William Jefferson, had retired. Further, take the California 50th congressional district as an example. There is no possible way Republicans would have held that seat in 2006 if Duke Cunningham had remained the Republican nominee, even if he had escaped jail time.
If an incumbent is unpopular, and his or her district is leans in favor of his or her party, then his or her retirement absolutely helps that party's electoral chances. PERIOD. This is why, as Kos pointed out yesterday, Democratic chances in Nevada and Arkansas would be improved with Harry Reid and Blanche Lincoln stepped aside, respectively. Reid and Lincoln are personally unpopular in Nevada and Arkansas, and a "generic Democrat" has a relatively better chance of winning either state. As such, their retirements would help Democratic electoral chances.
The same goes for Jim Bunning's retirement in Kentucky, which moved an almost certain Democratic pickup into toss-up / lean Republican territory. There is no hard and fast rule about whether an incumbent retirement, in and of itself, helps or hurts the incumbent's party. The effect of incumbent retirements needs to be examined on a case by case basis, using actual, scientific, empirical evidence (aka, polls).
Using such evidence, and engaging in such detailed examination, is not a strength of political writing from well-financed, established, national news organizations. And I'm not going to hide my agenda here: poor political writing from those organizations is what really angers me in this case. After spending years dismissing us, these well-financed, established, national news organizations are now stealing market share from smaller, independent, political websites by paying people lots of money to write "blogs" of their own. It pisses me off that they are able to do this even though those "blogs" are largely replicating the same, crappy conventional-wisdom and non-fact-based political writing that led to the rise of independent (in the institutional, rather than partisan sense of the word) political websites in the first place. They are beating us because they are able to pay people a lot more money, and because they are attached to well-established brand names, not because they have actually improved their writing all that much. This is exceptionally frustrating.
With the rare exceptions of people like Greg Sargent, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, who established themselves as independent bloggers before they became big media bloggers, most big media "bloggers" couldn't get even one million page views a year if they started independent political websites of their own. They certainly couldn't get the eight million page views of even a mid-range independent political website like Open Left. They would be nobodies without their institutions. Instead, they are well paid "bloggers" who help define the conventional wisdom. And yeah, as someone who has spent the last six years trying to make a living as an independent political writer, that really does piss me off. Effectively, with their move to "blogs," these news organizations are just yet more crappy superstores pushing small businesses to the side, to the benefit of absolutely no one except the superstore investors.
As has been written about all over the place, yesterday, NBC's John Harwood reported that a White House advisor dismissed bloggers as part of a left-wing fringe. Today, as Adam already discussed, senior White House communications advisor Dan Pfeiffer responded, saying those dismissive views do not represent those of the White House as a whole.
I accept Pfeiffer's email. Of course the entire White House does not hold such a dismissive view toward bloggers. While there are definitely some progressive blog haters staffing and advising in the White House, I doubt it is a majority opinion.
Even if you think a dismissive attitude toward the progressive netroots is widespread in the White House--and there really isn't any way to prove this one way or the other--it is important to remember that there are internal White House debates on virtually every policy and strategic choice it faces. This is as much the case when it comes to how to interact with the progressive blogosphere as it is with how to proceed on LGBT issues, troop levels in Afghanistan, how large the stimulus should have been, or whether or not to keep Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. All of these issues and more are debated inside the White House, and the progressive view is almost always represented. Rather than there being a single, monolithic viewpoint among President Obama, his aides, staff and advisers, what the White House ends up doing is following the internal argument that wins the day.
This undeniable existence of this internal White House debate shows how facile it is to criticize progressive bloggers for criticizing the White House, or to dismiss the White House as uniformly conservative. There are very few, if any, progressive criticisms of major White House strategic and policy decisions that are not voiced within the White House itself. Take, for example, Miachel Tomasky's diatribe from last year against progressives who opposed re-nominating Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense:
And people who can't see that Obama needs to reassure the political establishment by doing things like re-appointing Robert Gates at the Pentagon precisely so he can have the establishment's good will, which in turn grants him the room to operate and to isolate the political opposition, understand so little about politics that it's not even worth the time it would take to spell out the argument to them.
You can only vent such spleen against progressive critics of keeping Gates--or any other major Obama administration decision--if you assume a preposterous scenario where there is absolutely no debate within the Obama administration about such decisions. After all, many of the idiots who Tomasky deemed too stupid to understand the impossibly brilliant strategic calculus of the Obama transition team were working on the Obama transition team:
The speculation over Gates' tenure has been most intense inside the Obama transition team. The team received a request from Gates that, were he to stay, he would want to retain some of his top civilian assistants. The request led to concerns among the Obama transition staff: "Gates is not a neo-con or even a hardcore Republican," a person close to the process noted, "but the people around him sure as hell are."
These debates extend far beyond decisions like keeping Gates or not. There is internal debate within the White House itself, from both the left and the right, on every policy and strategic decision it makes. Once you accept this, the frequent online arguments over whether some progressives are being too critical of the President Obama, or whether the Obama administration as a whole somehow hates progressives, start to seem almost entirely pointless.
The Democratic Party is currently debating many facets of how the government should be run. Joining in this debate is good for both democracy and progressivism. If progressives don't voice our opinion on these debates, whether on minor matters like White House interaction with the blogosphere, or important matters like the size of the stimulus package, then we reduce the chances of the White House taking our side. Even if we lose these arguments more often than not--and I think we are losing them more often than not--participating in them is still a lot better than continuing with the internal blogosphere argument about whether we are clapping too loudly, or not loudly enough.
Many of these progressives were eager to support the opt-out because they believed it would ease passage of the bill, create political problems for Republicans, and that few states would opt-out. However, there were always two major problems with the opt-out, problems that have not been alleviated during the five days since the start of the craze:
No one knows what sort of public option states would be opting out of. It has never been made clear what type of public option states would be opting out of. It could be the weak, Schumer level-playing field public option. It could be the negotiated rates public option. It could be the Medicare +5% public option. It could be a public option even stronger than that. However, no one knows what it actually is:
The group submitted the idea to Senate Majority Harry Reid's office on Tuesday. But as of Thursday afternoon, no official white paper existed for Senators to work off of.
All that existed, indeed, was a somewhat vague idea with a myriad question marks. What kind of national public plan would be established? How, exactly, would states be able to opt-out? Would consumers be allowed to cross state lines for insurance?
If we don't even know what type of public option is in the opt-out compromise, there is no justification for claiming it is a better compromise than Senator Schumer's "level playing field" compromise. For all we know, it might be worse.
We don't know if the opt-out gains any votes. 51 Senators on record in support of the Schumer "level playing field" public option. This means there are enough votes to pass that public option if it achieves cloture. The other nine Democratic Senators fit into two tiers of likelihood on the cloture vote:
High-level threats to vote against cloture: Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson
Low-level threats to vote against cloture: Max Baucus, Mark Begich, Kent Conrad, Joe Lieberman, and Mark Pryor
Five days after the opt-out craze hit the big-time, not a single member of the high-level threat group has come out in favor of the opt-out plan. The best it has done is to move Ben Nelson from not ruling out a vote against cloture on health care reform with a public option, to saying the opt-out idea is "worth looking at." But it isn't clear that is any movement at all, since Nelson has just moved from being noncommittal to being noncommittal. Nelson did seem open to Carper's "opt-in" proposal, but I think every progressive pundit listed above would agree the opt-in is nowhere near as attractive as the opt-out.
If the opt-out compromise does not gain any votes for health care reform with a public option--which so far it has not--then there is no justification for claiming it is easier to pass then other public options.
These two points--that we don't know what kind of public option is in the opt-out plan and we don't know if the opt-out plan will be easier to pass--render all other discussions about the value of the opt-out idea moot. Considerations such as how many states would opt-out, or the political problems an opt-out would create for Republicans, just don't matter if the proposal doesn't get us any closer to passage. Claims that the opt-out compromise is superior to the Schumer level playing field compromise cannot be justified if we don't know what sort of public option is in the opt-out compromise.
We progressive need to start demanding a higher level of detail and proof before jumping on board with the latest compromise craze. Specifically, we should be looking for Blue Dogs and Conservadems to be jumping on board with compromise crazes before we do. Otherwise, I fear we are just confirming the deeply held belief that progressives are more willing to cave to Blue Dogs and Conservadems than we are to forcing them into line. That is a belief we must dispel if we are going to have a more influential role in governing under the Democratic trifecta.
LESTER HOLT: John what we saw in that protest today, was it simply frustration or does it represent a serious problem the President is having with an important part of his base?
JOHN HARWOOD: As a practical matter Lester I don't think it's a serious problem. we've seen and certainly Bill Clinton learned that they Democratic President can get punished by the mainstream of the electorate for being too aggressive on social issues so for now I think the administration feels that if they take care of the big issues - health care, energy, the economy - he's going to be just fine with this group.
HOLT: But in general when you look at the left as a whole, have there been conversations about some things they thought would have been done but haven't?
HARWOOD: Sure but If you look at the polling, Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the "internet left fringe" Lester. And for a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn't take this opposition, one adviser told me today those bloggers need to take off their pajamas, get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.
Here is what I have learned about running the country from this:
Mock those who do not dress to your standards, implying that their attire is reflective of deeper, intellectual deficiencies.
Believe that the country is closely divided even when you have a clear majority.
Give anonymous quotes implying that your boss doesn't take a group seriously even as your boss is speaking to said group.
Basically, it seems to involve simultaneously internalizing and projecting a sense of paranoia.
Which is, you know, a pretty sound technique for building up a political party, much less a country. The key to governing is to use anonymous quotes to stir up resentment against people who publish their thoughts through independent online mediums. Or, if bloggers don't work for you, really whatever other group of people you feel is useful to stereotype and build up public resentment against.
Over the past few days, the progressive blogosphere has engaged itself in yet another pie fight over whether or not President Obama is teh awesome or teh suck. This particular fight arose from comments President Obama allegedly made about how progressive groups should supposedly stop attacking conservative Democrats:
President Obama, strategizing yesterday with congressional leaders about health-care reform, complained that liberal advocacy groups ought to drop their attacks on Democratic lawmakers and devote their energy to promoting passage of comprehensive legislation.
On the one hand, many bloggers are taking this to mean that President Obama is a corporate lackey siding with the conservative Democrats and that he wants his activists to be silent on health care reform. On the other hand, many bloggers are taking this as yet another brilliant move of Deep Blue-esque, ten-dimensional chess from the administration that is beyond the comprehension of mere "humans." Or, having been involved in about 6,744 of these arguments myself, at least I assume many bloggers are espousing those competing views.
Look people--whoever you are as I am being admittedly vague--it doesn't matter what President Obama says about process matters like this. No superior, competing reading of what President Obama allegedly said is actually going to result in more pressure on conservative Democrats. Success in key legislative fights like health care will be dependent upon our ability to put the Democratic leadership in a position where progressives give them no other choice but to pressure conservative Democrats to accede to popular, progressive demands. If we accomplish that, then whether or not President Obama is teh suck or teh awesome will not matter.
The week before last (week of June 15), TPMCafe hosted a book club discussion of Eric Bohlert's Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, which was as much a forward-looking discussion of the future of blogging as it was a backwards-looking discussion of the Eric's book and the history it covers. One reason for this was that everyone pretty much agreed-Eric got it where earlier authors did not. So discussions of the past linked more naturally to forward-looking speculation than to criticism of Eric's narrative.
That forward-looking discussion links quite naturally, I think, with my earlier diary, Changing The Dynamic of Congress--"The Choice Is Ours", and where I want to go next-into a deeper look at what it will take to change the dynamic, not just of Congress, but of American politics more generally. An added factor is the perspective I articulated in my series "Three Waves and A Wall: 2008 And The American Future, dealing with the confluence of macro-historical forces in our time, which I'll briefly recapitulate below.
But before doing that, I just want to note that Eric's first post, "The Rise of the Liberal Blogosphere", kicks off by mentioning Chris as the very first blogger he talks about:
In the introduction of my book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, I highlighted a YouTube clip from 2006, right after the mid-term elections, when blogger Chris Bowers is talking into the camera (I think) of Matt Stoller and Bowers answers the question: What does it take to be a liberal blogger? He starts listing all the requirements: "If you have no children, no one to support, and no career ambitions, then you too can become a full-time progressive blogger, as long as you're wiling to do nothing else in your entire life."
There's more about Chris in that diary, so if nothing else, you should read it for that. But there's actually a lot more, with folks like Amanda Marcotte, Armando Llorens, Greg Mitchell and Duncan Black weighing in. I want to cite a few of the things they said, before adding my two cents about how the blogosphere--along with the rest of the online new media--may be able to help do even more than any of the contributors to that discussion have imagined. This is not, I hope, because of an over-inflated sense of the blogosphere's importance, but rather, because of a larger sense of its place within a broader inter-active, flat-hierarchy media environment and how that plays into some much, much bigger historical forces at work....
In the effort to pass a public health care option, state blogs are going to be key. Today, North Decoder, a great state blog out of North Dakota, shows why.
Elected officials are very responsive to local media. As such, North Decoder has been pressing the state's two Democratic Senators to make a public statement on the public option. Entering today, Stand with Dr. Dean listed both Senators Conrad and Dorgan as "unknowns" on the public option. However, due to the efforts of North Decdorer to push Conrad and Dorgan to provide answers, we can now put Byron Dorgan in the "yes" column.
In the extended entry, you can read the answers that Senator Dorgan's office provided on the public option, in response to North Decoder's queries. I believe it is the first time Senator Dorgan has gone on record in favor of a public option.
Last year, Blue Dog Leonard Boswell received a left-wing primary challenge from former state Representative Ed Fallon. Boswell's central, and perhaps only, message to left-wing and new media-focused Democrats was his endorsement by Al Gore. Desmoinesdem explained at the time:
Accompanying these messages, Boswell's campaign has made sure to remind Iowa Democrats that Al Gore supports Boswell, whereas Fallon supported Ralph Nader for president in 2000. A photo of Al and Tipper Gore, along with a letter from Gore endorsing Boswell, are prominently displayed on the front page of the Boswell campaign's website.(...)
Last Thursday another glossy mailer from the Boswell campaign arrived in my mailbox. This one focused on Gore's endorsement of Boswell, with a large photo and a letter from the former vice-president. Here is an excerpt from that piece (all bolded passages were bold in the original):
Leonard Boswell, a remarkable congressman and my friend, is facing a serious primary challenge.
Whether the issue is global warming or increasing the minimum wage, making college more affordable or expanding health care to every American, Leonard Boswell is on the front lines of these issues, working hard for Iowans every day.
Democrats and Republicans on the committee took turns criticizing the legislation. Their chief complaint is that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, rather than the U.S. Department of Agriculture, would be in a charge of the credit program through which farmers could get paid for practices that store crop residue in the soil or otherwise reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
"As this bill stands today, I can't vote for it," Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Ia., told Vilsack. "I don't know of anyone else in the committee who can."
Al Gore is arguing that the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation has "the moral significance equivalent to that of the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s." Now, Leonard Boswell, along with seemingly all other Democrats on the Agriculture Committee, is hijacking climate change legislation unless it removes the EPA's authority to determine carbon offsets. Note that this is already on top of the bill's provision to eliminate the EPA's ability to regulate carbon itself, which is actually a step backward for climate change regulation in the Unites states.
The reason I bring is up is that, whenever groups like Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace criticize Waxman-Markey for not going far enough, they are immediately smacked down by bloggers like Joe Romm at Climate Progress for failing to offer up "politically realistic" alternatives. However, if this is all about political realism, then why are we seeing the following from Al Gore and Climate Progress in response to the Agriculture Committee's actions:
Al Gore has not made a single public statement about either Leonard Boswell or the Agriculture Committee, despite what they are currently doing to Waxman-Markey.. This is even though Boswell largely owes his position in Congress to Al Gore. One might think that political realists would use this past support to try and influence Boswell in some manner.
Climate Progress have never even mentioned Leonard Boswell once for the more than three years of their existence
according to Google. In fact, Climate Progress has never directly attacked the actions of the Agriculture Committee in the same way that it has repeatedly, and sometimes viciously, attacked environmental groups that criticize of the bill from the left. All Climate Progress is doing about the Agriculture Committee's actions is putting up articles declaring that the House will pass the bill, and a guest post very politely telling farmers why it would be super swell if they supported global warming legislation.
As such, here is my message for the self-proclaimed political realists who are supporters of Waxman-Markey:
The Democrats on the Agriculture Committee are probably, as a group, the most electorally vulnerable Democrats on any House committee. Some of the Democratic members of this committee, like Leonard Boswell, owe their continuing presence in Congress to people like Al Gore, and certainly to hundreds of progressive donors who would be upset about what Agriculture Committee Democrats are currently doing to climate change legislation. As such, either start directly attacking these vulnerable Democrats in progressive media and Democratic fundraising circles for what they are doing to Waxman-Markey, or stop priding yourself on your political realism.
If Waxman-Markey really is so unbelievably awesome, as both Al Gore and Climate Progress keep arguing, then we should be doing everything possible to pass it. Instead, Al Gore and Climate Progress seem to be giving the Democrats on the Agriculture Committee a free pass on significantly watering down the bill. I have no idea this is happening, but it certainly isn't because they are using all available, politically realistic means to pass Waxman-Markey.
Start playing some hardball, or stop telling us that we are about to get the best climate change bill politically possible.
Newspapers around the country are in serious trouble. Among the emerging online outlets, which are at least partly responsible for the decline of newspapers, the reaction has largely ranged from "it's their own fault" to "meh--it was inevitable."
As someone who celebrates the vastly declining cost of, and barriers to, information of all sorts that has come with the rise of the Internet, the "meh--it was inevitable" perspective makes a lot of intuitive sense. The network neutral Internet is the greatest cultural achievement since the printing press, and quite possibly the greatest cultural achievement of all time. It is a broad, democratizing force that has made self-publication available to over one billion people, broken down barriers to information access more than any other invention in history, and even created vast new social meeting spaces and opportunities for interconnectedness. And even if you don't like the Internet (which isn't bloody likely if you are reading this), it is still impossible to deny that it is the way of future it can't really be stopped (although telecom companies still threaten to stunt it quite a bit).
However, the declining cost of information also means that the tens of thousands of middle-class jobs the newspaper industry has shed are being replaced by tens of thousands of low-wage jobs in a new digital sweatshop. Information production is becoming a less viable way of making a living, and the lowered cost of information on the Internet is directly responsible for this severe wage reduction. Apart from a few highly compensated positions at in the short head, even the progressive political blogosphere has created mainly a bunch of low-wage jobs with few benefits, and vastly increased work requirements. For example, in the abstract, you might think that being the lead, co-lead, writer for websites which, over five years, have generated 40,000,000 visits and 60,000,000 page views, would have resulted in a pretty high standard of living. However, I can tell you from personal experience, that such an impression would be completely wrong. A year ago, the International Herald Tribune had a good article about the new low-wage economy to which the Internet has given rise.
And this is where I have a lot of empathy for the decline of the newspaper industry. Even though it was pretty much inevitable that the rise of the Internet would put a severe dent in the newspaper industry, and despite the vast cultural outpouring the Internet has brought with it, making a living as an information producer is now more difficult than ever. Whether you work for a newspaper that is struggling financially, or whether you work for an emerging media outlet online, in both cases you are probably scrambling to find a way to make ends meet. Long-term, it seems unlikely that information production will be an industry that produces a lot of stable, middle-class jobs. With the lowered cost of information comes a lowered value in the production of information, and increased information consumption cannot make up the difference.
The future waits for no one, and it would be futile to try and devise some way to turn back the clock. However, if you are a young person considering a career as a writer, the prospects of becoming a stable member of the middle-class aren't very good either online or in the dead-tree world. Perhaps this will change as the Internet economy matures, but it is equally possible we have entered a new period where writing for a living results primarily in downward, long-term socioeconomic mobility. In the future, writing might simply become a working-class profession.
A change of this sort has happened before. In the early days of political blogging, from 2000-2003, the conservative blogosphere was actually much larger than the progressive blogosphere. However, starting in late 2003, and continuing through late 2005, the audience for the progressive blogosphere surged. Over a two-year stretch, the progressive blogosphere turned a 3-1 audience deficit into a 2-1 audience advantage, even though the conservative blogosphere was actually gaining in overall audience during those two years.
It is now possible that the conservative blogosphere is close to parity with the progressive blogosphere in terms of overall audience. This is interesting, but also requires more study with more solid numbers to truly determine the state of play. Further, it is disturbing in that it might signal conservatives are starting to close the ground on progressives in terms of online infrastructure.
I have two preliminary explanations for this trend, which I explore in the extended entry.
We--participants in blog and email list small donor fundraising efforts--have to completely stop raising money for Blue Dogs. We should not give a single cent to any current member of the Blue Dog coalition. We should not give any money at all to any candidate who refuses to rule out joining the Blue Dogs once in Congress. If we hope to improve Democratic behavior in Congress, this break has to be as public and as thorough as possible.
In politics, money speaks a lot louder than either voting or public criticism. We can criticize Blue Dog behavior all we want, but as long as we keep funneling their members millions of dollars every two years in small, online donations, then we will actually be ratifying, not criticizing their behavior. We will be supporting their efforts to push the party to the right, not working to push the party to the left. We will be sending a clear signal of support for their votes, not working to hold them accountable for those votes.
Let's take a quick review of the Blue Dog behavior we are ratifying. The Blue Dog coalition has made it clear that they believe they have veto power over the entire agenda of the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership. After a meeting with President Obama three weeks before the election, the Blue Dogs declared:
"He also recognized that we had the numbers to block or clear" legislation coming from the White House if he is elected.
If they are coasting that they can block or clear whatever legislation they want, the Blue Dogs consider themselves to be in charge of D.C., not Speaker Pelosi or President Obama. Some highlight of their past behavior include being the driving force in the Democratic Party behind the 2005 bankruptcy bill (they voted 32-4 in favor), the 2006 ending of habeus corpus, the 2007 Iraq War blank check, and the 2008 FISA re-write (see here for both). So far in 2009, they only allowed the stimulus package to go through after extracting a pay-go promise from the Obama administration. Last month, they joined with the New Democrats to block foreclosure relief legislation, which Evan Bayh's Blue Dogs in the Senate seem to have killed. And most of them will vote against the budget, too.
The Blue Dogs are an overt obstacle to progressive governance. For crying out loud, their entire name comes from feeling "choked blue by the left-wing of the party." In the recent past, they have refused to send money to the DCCC because another member of Congress criticized them on Iraq. They are overtly anti-progressive and anti-left wing. They don't even work to help other members of the party. So, why are we working to help them?
We simply must stop funneling money to the Blue Dog coalition. Given how much we complain about Blue Dogs, this may seem self-evident, but it is not. In the past, I, personally, have helped raise a decent amount of money for Blue Dogs. Two of the fundraising pages that I helped build, Netroots Candidates and Blue Majority, took in about $150,000 for Patrick Murphy, Larry Kissell and Bill Foster, three members of Congress who are either Blue Dogs already, or who will be likely announced as such when the new Blue Dog membership list is made public. So, I am as implicated in sending Blue Dogs money in the past as anyone.
If we keep sending the Blue Dogs millions of dollars in small, online donations every year, then there is no incentive for Blue Dogs to ever change their behavior, or for Democratic candidates to not seek out membership in the Blue Dog coalition. Currently, being a member, or prospective member, of the Blue Dog coalition provides you access to a network of Hill staff, corproate lobbyists and their PACs, large donor fundraisers, and press releases back home to talk about how you aren't like those other, dirty liberal Democrats. If we want to change Democratic behavior in Congress, we have stop adding even more incentives for Democrats to become Blue Dogs. Instead, we must offer strong disincentives for them to become Blue Dogs, such as a significantly reduced access to online, small donor fundraising.
Unfortunately, in Scott Murphy's case, small online donors raised over $300,000 for him even after Murphy had stated he was applying to join the Blue Dogs. That has to stop. Before we raise money for other congressional candidates in 2009-2010, we have to extract promises from those candidates that they won't join either the Blue Dogs (for House candidates) or Evan Bayh's groups (for Senate candidates).
No more money for the Blue Dogs. We can't continue to ratify their efforts to push the Democratic Party to the right. There are plenty of candidates and organizations working to push the party in the opposite direction to whom we small online donors should give our money.
The newspaper business is in serious trouble. To help it out, Senator Ben Cardin is introducing legislation that will allow newspapers to operate at non-profits, thus presenting them with new revenue streams without damaging most existing ones:
Cardin introduced a bill Tuesday that would permit newspapers to operate as nonprofits, or 501(c)3 corporations, much as public broadcasting now does.
Under this arrangement, advertising and subscription revenue would be tax-exempt, and contributions to support coverage or operations could be tax-deductible.
Such a structure would require at least one significant change for most newspapers: They would not be allowed to make political endorsements, a staple of many editorial pages.
It isn't clear if this will work, because the non-profit sector is being hit even harder than the newspaper industry right now. Even beyond that, there is a more fundamental reason to question this legislation: are local newspapers actually worth saving?
Newspapers sell information. Americans are consuming news information at record rates. The cost of information is declining significantly with the rise of the Internet. As such, the newspapers that are failing simply have not increased the amount of relevant information they provide at a rate that maintained pace with the declining cost of information. And isn't the problem local newspapers face really as simple as that? It simply is not clear what essential service local newspapers provide that either is not, or cannot be, provided by other, cheaper mediums.
One counter-argument that does make sense to me on both a political and personal level is that local newspapers provide good local jobs. The blogosphere, by contrast, is giving rise to something akin to a digital sweatshop. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Americans are producing enormous amount of content for pay that is just above, or below, minimum wage and includes neither benefits nor weekends. That is not a sustainable model for the people producing the content. If that is the brave new future we face, then maybe instead of talking about saving newspapers, we should be talking about creating a national union hall for paid blogging. If a news outlet, or a computer company, or a progressive organization want to hire someone to blog for them, maybe there need to be standard, minimum rates of pay that everyone is forced to observe. Any website that does not observe that policy gets de-linked, or something.
I don't know if it would work, but its worth thinking about.
This is kind of funny. After a Simon Johnson was critical of Morgan Stanley in an interview on Bill Moyers, Morgan Stanley responded by blocking employee access to his website:
A reader reports his firm has blocked Internet access to BaselineScenario.com, and his requests to change this policy have so far gone unheeded.
Access to our site has been blocked in the past by China - for reasons that should be obvious (if you want to pretend there is no global crisis). But what kind of firm would not want its employees to access our macroeconomic analysis, Financial Crisis for Beginners, or your continuing debate about how to handle the world's myriad financial sector problems?
Oh, yes...
Morgan Stanley.
No doubt there is a simple and reasonable explanation that has nothing to do with our views on banks, their executives, and the political power of the financial sector. And it must be pure coincidence that Morgan Stanley was mentioned in a less than completely positive light during my February interview with Bill Moyers.
That is a pretty petty response from Morgan Stanley, and the sort of action that one would expect more from China than from a capitalist financial institution. However, I'm sure that the employees who engineered the website block received a performance based bonus for their work.
One of the sentiments I saw expressed during yesterday's meta discussions is that "no one in D.C. reads blogs anyway." This idea has been phrased both in a cynical / depressive manner ("no one who matters is reading us, so what does it all matter anyway?") and in somewhat nastier terms ("no one who matters reads Open Left, so Open Left doesn't matter.") Well, rest assured that Washington D.C. has, by a long way, the most political blog readers, per capita, of any city in the country.
Take Open Left as an example. Google Analytics reports that, since July 11th, 2007, the day we installed the service on our website, there have been 8,597,437 visits to Open Left, and 2,551,798 absolute unique visitors (and 16,788,540 page views, fwiw). Among states, the District of Columbia (not the metro area, just the District itself) actually ranks 7th, with 317,460 visits, behind only, in order, California, New York (a surprisingly close second), Illinois, Texas, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Among cities, only New York City has more visits to Open Left, with 462,980 visits between Manhattan and Brooklyn combined. Manhattan and Brooklyn have, however, about 8 times the population of Washington, D.C.
If you take the typical 30% ratio between visits to Open Left and absolute unique visits to Open Left, then there have been about 105,000 unique visits to Open Left in Washington, D.C. over the past 19 months. If you further consider that only about 27% of the 700,000 jobs in Washington, D.C. are related to politics, that is roughly half of all D.C. political employees. Now, consider that Open Left consistently ranks about 15-20th in terms of audience size among progressive political blogs--and that the progressive blogs larger than us are often vastly larger--and you start to get a grasp of just how frequently political blogs are read in Washington, D.C.
Political blogging, especially progressive political blogging, is a major news medium in Washington, D.C. On a per capita basis, progressive political blogs are more frequently read in D.C. than anywhere else--and by a long, long way. People in D.C. are reading what you post here. How much of an impact it has is entirely open to question, but it is getting read.
The anger that some establishment journalists have expressed over The Huffington Post being called upon during President Obama's first prime-time press conference deserves further explanation. It is, in part, as Atrios notes, about "where in the pecking order he's supposed to be," within the world of political media. And it is also, of course, about a perceived threat that new media outlets pose to more established ones. For years now, bloggers and other new media sources have been attacked as rabid, inexperienced, uninformed, arrogant, newcomers all as part of a campaign to keep bloggers, new media and grassroots types out of the political media establishment.
Beyond struggles over pecking order within the world of political media, attacks on bloggers, new media and other emerging grassroots types are also form of long-standing wedge politics designed to drive the progressive / Democratic coalition apart, and to keep the power center firmly in the centrist / corporatist wing.
My advice to Obama is to never pre-compromise with Republicans unless he negotiates with specific Republicans whose votes he secures at the same time. I have no problem with putting in compromises worked out with Specter and the women from Maine in return for their support, but you can't just put in stuff Republicans might go for.
Mark's comment was recommended 22 times, which is a huge number for a comment on Open Left. It was also virtually identical to what many of us here have said before, such as Paul Rosenberg, debcoop, and David Sirota. Really, it is a common idea in the progressive blogosphere that has been around for quite a while. Don't compromise with Republicans before negotiations even begin. Don't give them what they want unless it comes with a promise of actual votes.
Well, last night, President Obama was asked exactly the same question as Mark: "what has this experience with the stimulus led you to think about when you think about these future challenges?" And he offered up almost exactly the same answer:
Last night's discussion on "giving Obama a chance" was, in my opinion, quite useful. This is because the discussion helped clarify what most people mean when they urge others to "give Obama a chance." Based on this and other discussions on the subject, as best as I can tell, "giving Obama a chance" means "not writing negative things about Obama." Thus, one is not "giving Obama a chance" when one is not discussing the President-elect in a sufficiently positive tone.
That's fine. Political discussions of concepts like "giving someone a chance," "progressive" or "change" are often crippled by problems of vagueness relating to the Sorites paradox. Anything that helps solve such problems is both useful and welcome. When people can at least agree on the terms and definitions of an argument, often the source of disagreement disappears entirely. While that probably isn't the case here, as I explain in the extended entry, it might be close.
First, our request for $17,400 to secure Soapblox was met:
While the thermometer shows the fundraiser at slightly under the $17,400 goal, that total does not tell the whole story. More sources chipped in, too, including:
Over $200 raised directly for Soapblox by non-US citizens via PayPal
So, the fundraiser is actually over $20,000 at this point, well past our goal. Thank you, thank you, thank you! All of the money raised beyond the $17,400 goal will be used to continue upgrading Soapblox. Here is what the money from this fundraiser has already accomplished (more in the extended entry):
