Politics, The Water Cooler
Franklin Foer on the Blogosphere’s War on the Media
The New Republic writer discusses why liberal bloggers are helping destroy the credibility of media outlets, and questions about the new management of the Wall Street Journal.
By Paul McLeary Fri 6 Jan 2006 05:50 PM
Franklin Foer is a senior editor at The New Republic where he writes about politics and media. He has also covered Congress for U.S. News & World Report, and his work has appeared in Slate, the New York Times, the Washington Post, New York magazine and Spin. He is also author of the book, How Soccer Explains the World.
Paul McLeary: In December, you wrote a piece for The New Republic which took liberal bloggers to task for attacking the media for what you called its “Progressive-era ethos of public-minded disinterestedness.” What prompted the piece?
Franklin Foer: I had read the long Michael Massing series in the New York Review of Books [concerning the media] and he started to say a lot of the stuff I’d been thinking for a while about the annoying overreach of media bashers. I thought he did a lot of good work in critiquing the sort of mindless, sweeping, attack mode, but he didn’t quite take the critique all the way. He gave, I thought, liberal bloggers a little bit too much of a pass. In a lot of the attacks on my piece, people say that I’m trying to draw an equivalence between the Rush Limbaughs of the world and the Atrios’s, and I’m really not. I do think there’s a difference between the relentless attacking of Rush Limbaugh and the relentless attacking of an Atrios. Limbaugh very consciously wants to destroy the credibility of institutions like the Times and the Post, whereas Atrios and his ilk are unintentionally doing the same thing.
PM: It seems from some of the responses to your article and subsequent posts [on TNR’s blog, “The Plank”] that some on the Left don’t see that the effect of their critique — even though it’s coming from a different place — is essentially the same.
FF: The rhetoric is the same, I don’t think that the intent is the same. To me, it’s part of what makes the blogosphere annoying, is that there’s so little emphasis on argumentative and rhetorical precision. It’s so easy to attack — and I’m all for attacking — but when attacks become so unhinged and so imprecise, they actually become dangerous.
PM: The issue of objectivity has been batted about by many bloggers, with the Left complaining that the media’s obsession with being objective clouds a commitment to the truth, and the Right complaining about “liberal bias.” How can reporters win in this tug-of-war?
FF: I think that working within the rules of objectivity it’s possible to be tougher and be more of an annoyance to power. But I don’t think we need to abandon objectivity to accomplish those goals.
PM: Kos the other day wrote that it’s time to drop the derisive “MSM” [“mainstream media”] moniker because blogs have now joined the ranks of the mainstream media. He mentioned that if Kos were a daily newspaper, it would be the fifth-largest in the country.
FF: That’s laughable. I actually like Kos’s site — there’s actual substance on Kos’s site — not all of it I agree with, but he’s not a charlatan. I think he’s inflating his own importance, but I think that’s kind of part of the whole blogopshere’s game; that the blogosphere hates the so-called mainstream media so much that they view themselves being in some kind of zero-sum competition with the mainstream media. They view their own credibility and readership as coming directly at the expense of newspapers and television, and that mindset, I think, subconsciously causes them to be so vociferous in their attacks. They have some kind of self-interested motive in trying to destroy “that horrible MSM.”
PM: I think what gets lost in many bloggers’ critiques of the media is that without newspapers, magazines and television news programs to complain about, they wouldn’t have any news to digest.
FF: The smarter bloggers understand that. Digby has made this point, and Kevin Drum has made that point. Blogs are parasitic. With a few notable exceptions like [Josh] Marshall’s blog, bloggers analyze information, they don’t generate it. That said, I think a big logical flaw in the bloggers attack is that they want to destroy a system, but they really don’t have a viable model for replacing it.
The Right actually does have a model for replacing it. The Right has worked on creating its own newspapers and TV outlets and radio networks, so they actually do have an alternative to the current landscape. Whereas liberal bloggers hate the current landscape, but they don’t really propose any sort of other way of doing things.
PM: You also recently wrote about the Wall Street Journal and the management changes there. Do you see, as happened with the Journal, more and more business people coming into newspaper publishing, and squeezing out a management that actually understands what journalism is all about?
FF: The Journal was the one major media institution that had this tradition of turning journalists into corporate executives. The Post and the Times are family-run institutions, whereas at the Journal, the family has always removed itself from management, letting journalists make the decisions, and it really hasn’t worked out very well.
So I don’t think it’s the end of the Journal to have this guy running the place, [although] he doesn’t “get” journalism, I don’t think. He may understand how to make money, and to make journalism they need to make money, but the danger I think is that the Journal ends up selling out to Rupert Murdoch, because Murdoch has long salivated over the Journal, and Murdoch’s history of protecting quality is not high.
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Jon Garfunkel
Sat 7 Jan 2006 03:52 PMThanks for bringing attention to Foer's piece. A year before it was published, I wrote a 3,700-word essay on this titled Read Me, Not Them: The Rage Against the Elite and Mainstream Media. It should provide some historical background-- going back the last decade, at least-- as well as some colorful anecdotes of some of the media soothsayers.
I shared my findings one of the more well-known professors of new media, as well as
And I did share my findings with the CJR Daily editor when I stopped by your office back last February... but I understand that you don't just pay heed to anybody that walks in 116th & Broadway.
rghm
Sun 8 Jan 2006 01:23 AM"...one might expect [Chomsky] to be discerning..."
"...columnist Peggy Noonan, [who] gloated...'
"...In a February debate with debate with Zachary Roth..."
Thanks for the half-hearted effort, Jon. Could you please edit this for grammar and then repost, so it's not so much work for us to understand what you're trying to say? The three examples above come in quick succession midway through, after a fair number previously that made me stop and read a passage thrice. Such sloppiness is not merely frustrating; it is insulting. Thanks.
~Rob
(This is my maiden post to CJR, by the way.)
Jon Garfunkel
Sun 8 Jan 2006 11:42 AMRob-- I've cleaned it up. I regret that. And let me qualify that previous comment: if I don't take the time to edit these pieces, they most certainly won't be read. "Read Me, Not Them" was apparently some sort of source for a college class last year, though no one ever wrote me about it.
I've been looking to join some international organizations-- "Reporters Without Editors," or, if that's not available, "Reporters Without Excuses."
Even if I've cleaned up the copy, I still worry that I may be uneven in the facts I report. There's a lot of focus on individuals who may not be as important as I make them out to be.
As for what I'm trying to say-- what do I add to Foer's argument? Scanning through the reactions to his piece, the common dispute is that liberal bloggers claim to have a "mend it, don't end it" approach to the media. The exception I had found at the end of 2004 was Kos, who is still is seen as an agenda-setter for many liberal bloggers and blog-readers. On the other hand, I've been learning that his abrasiveness has been steadily turning off his past supporters. This I posted in a 9,000-word piece a year ago, but took down after a week, realizing I really did not have enough facts to take on a BigFoot in the blogging world.
darrelplant
Wed 11 Jan 2006 01:55 AMThe sweeping generalization that "blogs are parasitic" is especially ludicrous coming from an editor of The New Republic. I read TNR for a quarter-century until I finally let my subscription lapse last year, and while there are certainly some articles that consist of original reporting, a significant portion of the magazine is simply opinion and that has always been the case. Anyone remember the last big story broken by TNR?
Foer's piece on bloggers isn't substantially different than the type of blog-based media criticism he's complaining about. There are no citations. There are three unsourced quotes attributed to The Huffington Post, with no indication as to whether they come from named bloggers or anonymous comments. Unlike many bloggers, there aren't even any links in the online version of the article to the posts Foer references.
The quote Foer attributes to Atrios ("If idiots destroy institutions there's no reason to continue to respect them") can't be found in a Google search of his site (even in cached versions). Where's it come from? Was it fact-checked? I seem to remember TNR having a problem with that in the past.
darrelplant
Wed 11 Jan 2006 02:13 AMAnd what the heck is the stuff you guys were making up about "objectivity"? What blogger on the left has advocated that the press shouldn't be objective? Can you actually point to an example where someone influential in the progressive blogosphere has called for the press to be less objective? I've seen a lot of people calling for the press to be less obsequious and more willing to ask questions, but how is that less objective?
Jon Garfunkel
Wed 11 Jan 2006 09:35 PMI'll take this. You want quotes? I got 'em in my piece. Mostly from Kos, who I'd call influential in the liberal blogosphere. I'll just add the things I've learned in the year since I wrote that.
A year ago, Dan Gillmor wrote The End of Objectivity ahead of Harvard's Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference. This was well-linked before, and often discussed during the conference (though Gillmor ended up sharing a panel with Jimmy Wales, and learning a lot about NPOV). Gillmor's fairly liberal, and well respected, and
NYU's Jay Rosen has said on many occasions that he doesn't want to see the press go away, and not even the Times. Rosen's a liberal-- he's battered Bush a-plenty over this administration's handling of the press (echoing coverage by Boehlert, Suskind, others)-- but his credentials are more due to a certain kind of prestige as the journalism professor of blogging. What he says has a LOT of influence-- these are the best statistics I could muster back in March, but you'll see that his essay-length posts get more inbound links per post than anybody by far (he had no comment when I shared these numbers with him). There's a lot of great blog slogans bandied about Rosen and the blogging crew which are used to irk the press.
The trouble is that he's increasingly giving intellectual cover for the wingnuts who just want to battle the Times. Consider the statement of David Crisp, editor of the Billings Outpost weekly and website, on BuzzMachine in September: "As much as I admire Jay’s work, I think what happens on his website falls considerably short of a conversation. Virtually every thread is hijacked by anti-MSM blather of the most tedious and banal kind. "
Starting in the first week of October, Rosen wrote 6 posts over the course of 2 weeks about Judith Miller and the Times, generating over 400 comments, few of them charitable towards Miller or the Times.
I've met, spoken with, and interviewed liberal bloggers, "Kossacks" and other agitators (friends of mine) who've never heard of Gillmor or Rosen. But they all have the opinion that the the Times isn't engaging its liberal afterburner fuel, and they say they stop reading the paper. I don't the consequences are good for serious journalism-- or for liberalism.
darrelplant
Tue 17 Jan 2006 06:41 PMMr. Garfunkel, I don't see any quotes in your post or a link to your article. You don't point to any specific quote of Rosen's that supports the claim that bloggers want less objectivity. You don't quote Gillmore on that, either. You say you've talked to people but you don't produce any verifiable quotes. That's not an effective answer to my question "Can you actually point to an example where someone influential in the progressive blogosphere has called for the press to be less objective?"
Dark Side Steve
Thu 19 Jan 2006 08:17 AMThe most interesting thing about this is the blanket statements made towards the blogosphere. There are indeed blogs that uncover news, that break news, there are bloggers that are happy to work with the "MSM." The "mainstream media" has, in general, been very kind to me, as a blogger, and I've tried to reciprocate. I discussed this very thing with a producer for Dateline NBC, and it seemed we both felt the same way -- we go where the stories are. That said, I personally began a crimeblog because political blogging was so pervasive and after a while, so monochromatic. Crimeblogging is still a kind of punditry, and plenty of it is still just your usual ad hominem blog-like ranting, but I'd like to think it is a sign that the blogosphere is not the homogenuous mass of whiny goo Mr. Foer seems to believe it is.
That said, I think Mr. Foer has a point -- myself and others who blog about crime seem to have accepted right away that we had to work hand in hand with the media. I've gotten tips on stories before members of the MSM, only to turn the tip over to one of the producers I knew, because as a lone blogger, I didn't have the resources to verify it the way an entity like NBC might. Then again, I've used search engines to scoop the mainstream media more than once. All this windiness to say Franklin Foer has a good point about the blogosphere's many weaknesses, but may be unaware that it is a universe that is still in evolution. Out of that, news is being made, broken. It is also being chewed up and regurgitated. I'm starting to believe what I read recently, a statement made by another journalist, his name escapes me -- in the end, it's all just writing.