(NOTE: This post generated strong criticism from commenters who pointed out that Kerry wasn't singling out blogs in his speech. The key point is that Kerry wants the mainstream media to act as "arbitrators" of the truth; not that he despises blogs in particular. Therefore, I've revised the post accordingly.)
In the Christian Science Monitor, Mark Sappenfield reports that an increasing number of politicians are bypassing the mainstream media by starting their own blogs:
In many ways, the blog provides politicians an opportunity to recast themselves away from the mainstream media. Across the bay in San Francisco, Supervisor Chris Daly has begun a blog to counter what he feels is biased reporting in the local paper.On the other hand, other politicians, like failed presidential candidate John Kerry, think we need the mainstream media as intermediaries, helping the public make sense of the many, possibly misleading, information sources available today. In a recent speech, Kerry said:
"I've not done well in the newspaper coverage," says Mr. Daly. "The Internet is a way to get my message out to people who are wired."
When fear is dominating the discussion and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem.So, it seems, there are now two types of politicians: those who see mainstream media as a problem, and those who see mainstream media as the solution.
We learned that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning. But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information. And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country. And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that.
Given a choice between the two, vote for the former. The other one doesn't trust your ability to critically evaluate information and make intelligent decisions.
And if he doesn't trust you, why should you trust him?
(ANOTHER NOTE: The Chrisitan Science Monitor article also claims that Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has his own blog. I'm not sure if they're talking about his official website — it doesn't seem all that bloglike to me.)
15 comments:
Definitely agree there. More information is better than less. Sure, most people won't visit sources beyond the mainstream media, but why not have more information available for those who are interested?
Posted by Greg
That Kerry quotation is rather ambiguous. What makes you think that he is singling out and castigating blogs? Kerry benefited greatly from blogs in the 2004 election. Kos, Atrios, Josh Marshall, etc. drummed up a good deal of support for a basically uncharismatic candidate. I suspect that Kerry is speaking about outfits which masquerade as legitimate news organizations but present half-truths, innuendo, GOP talking points and out-and-out lies as gospel.
Also, although you wouldn’t know it from your selective quoting, Kerry identifies a undisputedly legitimate and troubling issue, the electorate's misapprehension of key facts. Regardless of how anyone feels about the war on terror / Iraq war, it should be of concern that "77 percent of the people who voted for George Bush on Election Day believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq" and "77 percent of the people who voted for him believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11." Listen, facts are facts, regardless of whether they are advanced by right wing or left wing journalists, pundits, bloggers or whatever. Kerry is not taking issue with the advancement of knowledge and facts, but with the dissemination of propaganda and hooey.
Also, taking pot shots at John Kerry is so 2004. Get over it, you won. You control the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, and the majority of governorships. You got you war and your Patriot Act and your bankruptcy bill and your tort reform, etc etc. It is clear that no one will ever be held accountable for the "missteps" of the Bush administration. The defensive stance and faux indignation of the conservative movement makes great theater and gets out the vote, but come on, it is the dominant cultural hegemony. Move on (no pun intended, well, maybe).
Posted by Bojack
Bojack:
"Regardless of how anyone feels about the war on terror / Iraq war, it should be of concern that "77 percent of the people who voted for George Bush on Election Day believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq" and "77 percent of the people who voted for him believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11."
And that figure comes from what source? Seems like something someone with an axe to grind might drum up. If it comes from a legit source, by all means cite it, and I will be happy to acknowledge it. In the meantime, the only person to have cited that figure in a speech is Kery himself in a speach at the Kennedy Library on February 28th (as referenced by P.J. O'Rourke in his Weekly Standard column of March 15, 2005). Link: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/350fnrnt.asp?pg=1
Another of Kerry's hapless quotes is a doozy, and further illustrates what Gaijin Biker has already made clear in the original post:
""A lot of the mainstream media were very responsible during the campaign. They tried to put out a balanced view, and they did show what they thought to be the truth in certain situations of attack. . . . But it never penetrated. And when you look at the statistics and understand that about 80 percent of America gets 100 percent of its news from television, and a great deal of that news comes from either MTV, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Jay Leno, David Letterman, you begin to see the size of the challenge." (Those were all Kerry supporters or, at any rate, Bush opponents, but this thought--if any thinking occurred--didn't slow Kerry.) "And so I don't have the total answer. I just know it's something that we've really got to grapple with."
As for "Also, taking pot shots at John Kerry is so 2004", that kind of expression is so "back-in-the-day" as to be ancient.
Posted by Langtry
Sharon, I remember hearing about one poll (not going to look for the link right now) that found 72% believed those things. Kerry may have just boosted that up to 77% for whatever reason.
More importantly, what was the methodology of that survey? I hope it was a bit more reliable than the notorious exit polls on election day that projected a Kerry win.
At any rate, Bojack, I seriously doubt that 77% of Bush supporters really thought Saddam was responsible for 9-11. (I didn't, but maybe I'm part of the enlightened 33%. Then again, I read a lot of blogs, so I should have been brainwashed by the evil sub-media.) I can see many people believing there was some degree of contact between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, maybe. But that Saddam was actually, directly responsible? Unlikely.
Moreover, who was really making that claim at any point close to the presidential election? I'd like to see some evidence of the sinister "sub-media" actually claiming that Saddam was responsible for 9-11.
And sure, Bojack, Kerry probably doesn't mind blogs that help his cause, like Kos or Atrios. But that just makes his statements even more odious. He's not against the "sub-media" per se , just the parts of it that say things he doesn't like.
To take two dubious assertions — that 77% of Bush voters thought Saddam pulled off 9-11, and that we found WMD in Iraq — as evidence that a wide swath of disreputable "sub-media" sources is continuously and intentionally misinforming the public is itself an irresponsible and misleading accusation. What about the role played by conservative blogs in countering media bias, and in keeping the MSM, Kerry's trusted arbitrators of truth, accurate? Conservative blogs weren't the ones cooking up phony memos about Bush.
And what about the New York Times', and other MSM outlets', recent admission that there had been widespread, systematic dismantling of Saddam's WMD production sites in the period leading up to the U.S. invasion?
The Times reported on March 13:
The kinds of machinery at the various sites included equipment that could be used to make missile parts, chemical weapons or centrifuges essential for enriching uranium for atom bombs.
Where was that story before the election? I wonder what percentage of Kerry voters thought Saddam had no WMD production facilities at the time we were preparing to invade. Wouldn't a high percentage in that area mean that the MSM is harming "the decision-making ability of the American electorate"?
Posted by GaijinBiker
Unless "sub-media" is some focus-group vetted code word for the blogosphere, I simply don't see Kerry's statements as being particular to blogs. I would think that the "sub-media" refers to the rivers of misinformation that are available over television, talk-radio, newspapers, the internet, direct mailings, etc.
In any event, Kerry is not suggesting that people's access to information should be limited. That's silly. As we all saw, the man's strong point is the debate. To me, this reveals him as someone who trusts that people will employ the scientific method and rational analysis to properly navigate through the marketplace of ideas. May the person who makes the most logical argument win, not unlike the approach I have seen in the discussions on this blog.
How does one even suggest that Kerry's m.o. is to limit public access to information and opposing viewpoints in light of those Bush "town-hall meetings" with their hand-selected audiences and loyalty oaths.
Interestingly, you cast away the 77 (or 72)% polls as "dubious." Believe me, I'd like to think that those numbers are bogus too. It's disheartening to believe that so many people could be mislead. Do you actually have reason to take issue with the methodology of the polls. Or is simply that such a large percentage of people misapprehending the facts at such a fundamental level is really troublesome for you too... and therefore can't be true?
Posted by Bojack
Regardless of whether the 77% number is true or not, for Kerry to hint that that's why he lost the election is just silly. He lost for a lot of reasons, and finding or not finding WMD's would be way down the list. Wasn't the big story right after the election that Bush won because of his stand on "moral issues"?
I personally think Bush won in large part because Americans liked his plain-spoken, humble style more than Kerry's dour, haughty patronizing. How many WMD's we found in Iraq didn't really make a difference. (Perhaps Bush voters said they thought we found WMD's in Iraq just to back up their gut-level decision to vote for him.)
Moving on (har!), I agree that Kerry's comments were not limited to blogs. But he is clearly uncomfortable with the fact that people can just toss whatever comments or stories they like into the marketplace of ideas.
Kerry simply doesn't trust folks like you and me to make up our minds about complicated issues and conflicting claims. Hence, in the linked article, his desire to have the MSM "arbitrating the truth".
But ironically, many of the same mainstream media sources Kerry praised as having done "a pretty good job of discerning" the truth, like Judith Miller in the New York Times, in fact were the biggest proponents of the Saddam-had-WMD's story.
More information sources are always better, as long as you trust people to choose among them, to weigh the facts, and to make smart choices. Kerry doesn't.
Posted by GaijinBiker
GB,
Seriously, you might want to reread what you've quoted because it doesn't say what you're implying it says. He is not criticizing anyone who is actually providing information;he is criticizing media that substitute entertainment value for news.
You agreed with John Stewart when he said it about Crossfire, right?
Where in what you've quoted does he say anything that could be reasonably interpreted as saying that he thinks fewer information sources are best or that people can't be trusted to weigh the facts or that he "wants to limit your access to information"?
Kerry was not comparing old media with blogs. He was quite clearly comparing news with entertainment.
Has your dislike for the man skewed your reading comprehension skills that much?
Posted by Big Ben
At the time that survey came out, some in the blogosphere pointed out that the results were due to the questions asked. If the questions had instead been along the lines of "Since no WMDs were found, Saddam met the requirements of Resolution 1441" and "Secular Saddam and religious Al Qaeda have had no interaction," you would have gotten the reverse results.
Posted by Greg
To start off, I never took a position on the validity of what John Stewart said about Crossfire. In my only post on the subject , I simply noted that it was ironic that the show was cancelled shortly after he criticized it.
Moving to the main issue, perhaps I should have quoted Kerry more fully. I decided not to, because I had already quoted that part of his speech in a previous post.
Anyway, here it is:
"There has been," he said, "a profound and negative change in the relationship of America's media with the American people. . . . If 77 percent of the people who voted for George Bush on Election Day believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq--as they did--and 77 percent of the people who voted for him believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11--as they did--then something has happened in the way in which we are talking to each other and who is arbitrating the truth in American politics. . . . When fear is dominating the discussion and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem."
Kerry knows that he can't ban the exercise of free speech. But his comments make two things clear:
(1) he is troubled by information sources that allegedly mislead the public with "false choices"
(2) he thinks it is the job of the mainstream media to discredit these misleading sources by "arbitrating the truth".
Problem is, sometimes the mainstream media is the false choice. I don't trust CBS or the New York Times to arbitrate the truth for me. I like to evaluate lots of sources and make up my own mind.
Kerry seems to think I'm not up to the challenge — that maybe I'll get misled by "sub-media" sources (including blogs, talk radio, late-night TV shows, and so forth) that distract me from The Truth as proclaimed by people like Jayson Blair and Dan Rather.
Also, while Kerry complained about "a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information", he also laments that "fear is dominating the discussion". That strikes me as a clear reference to serious political commentary and debate, not to entertainment.
Kerry's rhetorical question, "Do we smash the windows of Rupert Murdoch's headquarters? Do we nationalize the Drudge Report?" pretty clearly shows that he's thinking about straight news sources, not just John Stewart, MTV, and late-night talk shows — which were all anti-Bush anyway.
Posted by GaijinBiker
To cover your last two points:
(1) Who isn't troubled by people being presented with false choices? Is there something controversial about this?
(2) You're twisting what he said again. He said there needs to be some sort of arbitrator when false information is being spread around. He didn't say who it should be or what form it should take, and to think that he was advocating some sort of supression of free speech is ridiculous. You're well informed enough to know that Kerry has a long career of defending free speech issues. He is saying that it disturbing when emotions become more important than facts and no one knows who to turn to to find the truth. "I don't have the total answer. I just know it's something that we've really got to grapple with. "
When large precentages of the voting public believed that WMD had been found (whatever you might want to argue about recent information, at the time they had not, and several official reports had been released stating that they had not) and when large percentages of the voting public believed that Saddam had a close working relationship with al Qaeda, something is broken in the way news is communicated to the people. I don't know how to fix it, but surely you acknowlege that there is a problem here?
Posted by Big Ben
Note that I've edited the original post to address some of your (and Bojack's) criticisms.
Now, while we all agree false information is a problem, the bigger problem would be setting up a limited number of sources — the "mainstream media" — as judges of what is true. America is based on the concept that people can speak freely, throw their views into the marketplace of ideas, and the public, through a process of evaluation and consideration, will know who to discredit and who to believe.
It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty darned good. (It certainly got us to the bottom of the forged National Guard memos in record time, whereas an undue deference to mainstream media might have seen the memos taken at face value.) And it's certainly better than the alternative of state-approved media sources. (Yes, I know Kerry didn't propose that. He didn't propose anything!)
While it's always troubling to have people ignorant of basic facts, I think holding up a single poll as proof that Americans are ill-informed is overblown. As I mentioned above:
I personally think Bush won in large part because Americans liked his plain-spoken, humble style more than Kerry's dour, haughty patronizing. How many WMD's we found in Iraq didn't really make a difference. (Perhaps Bush voters said they thought we found WMD's in Iraq just to back up their gut-level decision to vote for him.)
Kerry would like to believe a better Times article here or a squelched FOX story there would have turned the tide in his favor, but at the end of the day, he was an immensely unlikable candidate. He only got as many votes as he did because a large number of people decided to vote for "Anybody But Bush".
And that's the truth.
Posted by GaijinBiker
GB --
You posit that "Bush won in large part because Americans liked his plain-spoken, humble style more than Kerry's dour, haughty patronizing" and "[h]ow many WMD's we found in Iraq didn't really make a difference." You are probably correct about this. However, given the myriad novel, complicated and weighty issues that confront us in a post 9/11 world, is it not troublesome that the electorate largely came to its decision based on how it felt rather than on what it thought?
Posted by Bojack
No... I think people in the aggregate are good judges of character. And a person's character can't be manipulated like data can. So in that way, going with your feelings about a person is an even more reliable approach than going on dry facts.
And character matters. We elect a president, not an encyclopedia.
Posted by GaijinBiker
A more reliable approach to what, exactly? We are electing the President of the United States, not class president.
Posted by Bojack
Thanks for the update. You've proved yourself a blogger of honor, not that I ever doubted that.
I wish I had more time to argue the smaller points with you.
Posted by Big Ben
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