Hello!
Today you get a political-analysis blog about political-analysis blogs. I’m focusing on the political power that blogs can have, even if deemed ‘unofficial’ by reputable news sources.
At first thought, the term ‘blog’ calls to mind an unprofessional, meandering stream-of-consciousness upchuck of odds-and-ends arguments that crumble under closer investigation. And yes, the low difficulty of setting up one’s own blog definitely contributes to that.
But now, a substantial number of pundits that have a definite bias use blogs as a source of information, or at least take them seriously enough to mention them and thus increase their pageviews, as stated in the article “The Power of Politics and Blogs,” by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell. Blogs can have a much wider impact on readers than the large news channels: In the article, one blogger mentioned that a few readers had turned to his blog for their sole source of news, and he urged them to stop, because while he was indeed reporting facts, he was also splicing his own opinions into the story.
Many more news outlets have picked up on this trend, and either hire bloggers or publish their stories in papers. In addition to using blogs in their everyday information searches, many journalists use blogs as a way to check audience reaction and catch mistakes they may have made. Some reporters admit to checking a single blog up to six times a day, or even relying on them for breaking news.
Bloggers do have an advantage over most news outlets: Immediately after news happens, they can post their reactions, without worrying about being overly specific, or getting every detail absolutely correct for fear of backlash. Posters can act and react almost before the headlines hit the home page of their usual news channels. In fact, the authors say that bloggers almost have the ability to predict what’s going to be reported before it’s actually reported. For example, one agreement among bloggers that a certain story needed a closer look resulted in an actual investigation by news outlets.
As this article was published in 2004, the authors’ prediction that blogging will become “more directly integrated into ‘politics as usual,’ losing some of their flavor of novelty and immediacy in the process” seems to have come true in some ways, but is not accurate in others. We certainly have had an influx of blogs that garner only a few readers and repeat the same tired arguments, but at the same time we’ve got more rising blogs that inspire people and promote social change.
On a side note, the authors of the article (and many others) believe that the increasing division between the main political parties is largely due to blogs, and the authors’ tendency to include issues that help their opinions and omit points that would work against them. Going back to my first entry, I keep seeing this theme everywhere. It’s amazing how so many people have noticed this and yet its effects are worse than ever. In social change and politics, blogs have surprising power, so I think that if enough people unite and decide what’s in their best interests, we can move the focus of our news to what we need to concentrate on as a nation.
Thank you for reading; see you next time.
Referenced Article: Drezner & Farrell, “The Power and Politics of Blogs,” Duke.edu, August 2004. http://www.cs.duke.edu/courses/spring05/cps182s/readings/blogpowerpolitics.pdf
It's interesting to see how influential political blogs can be on people's opinions (and elections), and using blogs collectively to impart social change is a noble idea. However, I think we need to be careful about encouraging collusion among bloggers. Although the sentiment is great, I feel like encouraging bloggers to put forth a uniform point of view would take away from the diversity of discourse that can be found on blogs today.
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