*Welcome To Our German Visitors! * Welcome to Mr. Richard Jan Gutjahr, Mr. Thomas Peter Jarzombeck, and Ms. Ikbal Kilic. And welcome to our interpreter, Ms. Anna Koch.
I hope that I will be able to answer some of your questions about American bloggers, and perhaps about American politics. And being at least as curious as Kipling's mongoose, I have some questions for you, too. A. J. Liebling <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.J._Liebling>, who wrote for the /New Yorker/, once observed that: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." When Americans got most of their news from a few television networks and from large newspapers, it was difficult for those without fortunes to reach the public. With the spread of internet access to most American families, that changed. Now, almost anyone who wants to have a "press" can have one. Matt Drudge had almost no resources when he started his site <http://www.drudgereport.com/>, but he broke stories that "mainstream" reporters were unwilling to touch, and now has an audience in the millions. (And can direct hundreds of thousands to a particular news article, just by linking to it on his site.) Most reporters count it a great success if he links to one of their articles. The cost for owning a simple site like my own is astonishingly low. Even if I did not have the site, I would have a computer and an internet connection, so the /additional/ costs are almost certainly less than $20 a month <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/September2007_3.html#jrm5411>. I don't know what presses and television and radio equipment cost, but I am pretty sure that it is more than $20 a month. Money may not matter much, but expertise does. Charles Johnson, who writes the popular blog, Little Green Footballs <http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/>, was able to help break the Dan Rather forged documents story because, as a programmer, he had become an expert on fonts. When I want to know something about Supreme Court decisions, I can read the New York Times or the Washington Post, but I think I get better analyses from UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh <http://www.volokh.com/> and his colleagues. When I want to know something about military questions, I often turn to one of the "milblogs", that is, a blog written by men who are serving, or have served, in our military. Although he does not have a milblog, I have learned much from Donald Sensing <http://www.senseofevents.blogspot.com/>, a Methodist minister --- and a former artillery officer. Expertise is especially important when a blogger with the right kind of expertise spends time on a single subject. For example, in this area, Stefan Sharkansky became /the/ expert on the problems we had in our 2004 election for governor, often by looking through computer records. He even set up a publicly available database <http://www.soundpolitics.com/voterlookup.html> for all the voters in Washington state, so that others could look for problems, too. Sharkansky could do that because he is, as you probably guessed, a software expert as well as a blogger. (Full disclosure: I contribute regularly to his main site, Sound Politics <http://www.soundpolitics.com/>.) That expertise, and more than a little doggedness, gave Stefan a great legal victory <http://soundpolitics.com/archives/012881.html>. Now, a little about my own experience. Very few bloggers begin political blogs because they are satisfied with the mainstream media, ABC, the Associated Press, the BBC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all the rest. I am no exception to that rule. I began blogging because I saw factual errors, persistent bias, and shallow or missing coverage of important subjects by our mainstream media, or as I usually call them, our "mainstream" media. Here's a particularly bad example of those errors <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/January2003_1.html#jrm509>. But what I found even more amazing was that the two news anchors apparently did not know that some nations were worried about falling populations. Demography has fascinated me for years. I think very few American journalists understand the subject, despite its importance. An example: Between 1871 and 1910, the population of France grew from 36 to 39.5 million. During the same time, the population of Imperial Germany grew from 41 to 65 million. You do not have to be a historian to realize that our history would have been very different if those population gains were reversed. That's why I wrote this post giving the basic data on American fertility <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/February2006_4.html#jrm3988>, and this post on changed policies in Russia <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/May2006_2.html#jrm4222>. Bloggers can concentrate on areas where they have some expertise, and I have tried to do that. For example, because I had some methodological training years ago, I find it easy to recognize the "ecological fallacy", which I spot from time to time, notably in columns by Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/November2004_2.html#jrm2796> of the New York Times (and Princeton University). Because I have been studying vote returns for decades, I often come to different conclusions than most reporters; for example, here's what I had to say on the black vote <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/May2004_3.html#jrm2206> in our presidential elections, and about elections in Muslim countries <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/April2005_4.html#jrm3206>. And because I have had some training in analyzing public policy, I did two posts, here <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/December2004_3.html#jrm2896> and here <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/May2004_1.html#jrm2150>, on how a series of presidents have cut federal taxes for poorer Americans. Bloggers can also cover stories neglected by "mainstream" journalists; that's why I did these posts on Presidents Lincoln <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/February2007_2.html#jrm4882> and Washington <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/February2007_3.html#jrm4907>, and why I went to church to see the documentary, /Obsession/ <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/January2007_4.html#jrm4859>. And they can cover stories from a different angle; I covered the massive pro-illegal immigration rally here in 2006, in part because I did not think that "mainstream" journalists would even note the extremists <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/May2006_1.html#jrm4193> there. (And I followed that post, with one showing families <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/May2006_1.html#jrm4213>, so my readers would understand that the extremists were not representative.) At about the same time, I did two posts on a local group, Where's the Math? <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/May2006_1.html#jrm4192>, which is trying to restore standards in math education <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/May2006_3.html#jrm4249>. Or stories where they believe that most "mainstream" journalists have been wrong. That's why I did this post on the big increase in spending for research and development <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/September2008_1.html#jrm6454> since 2001, and this post on our bookworm president <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/September2008_1.html#jrm6442>. By way of contrast, here is Barack Obama's reading list <http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/01/obamas-reading-list-revised.html>, and here's a /selection/ from George W. Bush's reading list <http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/01/george-w-bushs-reading-list.html>. Although what I do is similar to what many of the better bloggers do, my site is atypical in several ways. It is hand coded; I write the HTML code for it directly, rather than using a program to generate the posts. I have chosen not to have comments, at least for now. And I probably take a softer tone than most American bloggers, at least those who write on politics. On the whole, I try to be civil in my critiques and "family friendly" in the words I use. And I sometimes play peacemaker. Last year, for example, I put up this post <http://soundpolitics.com/archives/009152.html> describing a small good deed I had done for three leftists on Mt. Rainier. And earlier this year I put up this hummingbird post <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/February2009_2.html#jrm7076> for similar reasons. About the harshest post I have done was one attacking a local journalist, Ryan Blethen <http://soundpolitics.com/archives/005897.html>. Some people think he got his job at the Seattle Times through family connections rather than talent. (I don't know if nepotism is a significant problem in Germany, but it sometimes is here in the United States. For instance, few think that the current publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ochs_Sulzberger_Jr.>., is a good man for that difficult job. But he is the son of the previous publisher.) Finally, since bloggers are publishers, as well as editors and reporters, they can indulge themselves from time to time. That's why I put up this post on the buying choices and habits of Democrats and Republicans <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/December2004_1.html#jrm2856>. Some bloggers regularly write about their cats, often on Friday afternoons. I am more likely to put up mountain pictures <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/April2008_3.html#jrm6003> on Friday afternoons, especially pictures of Northwest volcanoes <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/September2006_4.html#jrm4581>. (Sometimes readers see more in my pictures than I intend <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/December2007_4.html#jrm5695>.) Now, back to the question that may interest you most: How has all this blogging affected American journalists? It has, I think, made their jobs less pleasant, because anything they write or say can become the subject of a critical blog post, which may get picked up by other bloggers, and spread all over the country. It must feel, some days, like walking through a pack of snapping and snarling little dogs. And the bloggers have brought about new career risks; Dan Rather might not have been fired from the CBS post that he had held for so many years, if the forged documents he used had not been exposed by bloggers. But blogging also has changed journalism in positive ways, and a few journalists are beginning to understand that. For example, the expertise that some bloggers have is an enormous resource that journalists can tap, without much effort. Although not all reporters understand this yet, some bloggers are, in effect, unpaid researchers, who dig up facts journalists can use. (Some journalists credit bloggers when they use their work; some journalists don't.) For example, many journalists have begun to take advantage of the Real Clear Politics <http://www.realclearpolitics.com/> site, because it has a handy compilation of current polls. (Formally, the site is not a blog, though it includes one, but it is put together by a few amateurs, not by professional journalists.) When I originally wrote that paragraph in 2007, I was more positive about the prospects for "mainstream" journalists learning from bloggers. Unfortunately, I think that partisanship has become so strong that it has affected the flows. As I said a few years ago, our talk show hosts, who are almost all conservatives, have begun using the work of conservative and libertarian bloggers <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/January2005_3.html#jrm2981>. But our "mainstream" journalists are much more likely to use work from leftist bloggers. Bloggers can help journalists in a more controversial way; they can make reporting more accurate. When I write posts, I sometimes make mistakes, just as journalists sometimes make mistakes in their stories. When readers spot those mistakes and tell me about them, I correct the mistakes --- and I thank the person who caught my error. I thank them because they have done me (and other readers) a favor by making my work more accurate. (Here's a recent example <http://www.seanet.com/%7Ejimxc/Politics/March2009_4.html#jrm7236>.) But not all American journalists have come to the same conclusion as I have. Here's an example <http://www.seanet.com/July2008_2.html#jrm6264> from July, 2008. If just one of the people on the Seattle Times editorial board had read that post, they could have fixed a very embarrassing typo. Finally, many journalists are beginning to write their own blogs. There are two that I would recommend to almost everyone, the Los Angeles Times' Top of the Ticket <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/> and John Tierney's <http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/>. - 10:15 AM, 1 May 2009 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
