There will be deserved talk today over how a group of Right-wing bloggers and talking radio party mouth-pieces (note not all, some have withstood criticism and not joined the mob – and yes it is a mob), took Jill Carroll‘s release, instead of a cause for celebration, or at least pause, to be a moment to viciously attack a fellow American for different world views. They took the circumstances around her being let go from her captors and the propaganda tape she was forced to make as evidence of her being anti-American and in league with terrorists. Attacking a victim of fear and hatred with more fear and hatred.
Right Wing Nut House’s “TWICE A VICTIM” was especially powerful in its critique and concern:
In people’s haste to be first, or different, or just plain ornery and contrary (all the better to get links and readers) a culture of “shoot first and ask questions later” has arisen in the blogosphere that quite frankly, is proving every bad thing that the MSM has been saying about blogs from the beginning. Many of us – including myself – have been guilty in the past of hitting that “Publish” button when perhaps it would have been prudent and proper to take a beat or two to think about what we just wrote and the impact it might have beyond the small little world we inhabit in this corner of Blogland.
Scalp hunting has become the national pastime of blogs. Both lefty and righty lodgepoles have some pretty impressive trophies hanging on them; Dan Rather, Mary Mapes (twice), Eason Jordon, Trent Lott, Ben Domenech, to name a few more noteworthy ones.
But is this what we are? Is this what we are becoming? Are we nothing more than a pack of digital yellow journalists writing pixelated scab sheets vying to see who we can lay low next? If this be the way to fame and fortune in the blogosphere, I truly fear that, like television, the last great technological breakthrough that promised to change the world, we will degenerate into a mindless, bottomless pit of muck and mudslinging, dragging down the culture and trivializing even the most important issues.
This is no idle concern that can be dismissed as the nature of the beast or the way of the world. This kind of thing has to be stopped, an admitted impossibility with 29 million blogs out there. Maybe it’s enough that we are aware of it and that people of good faith and good intentions will, in the end, marginalize the muckrakers and come out on top.
Don’t count on it.
…My question is what will the blogosphere look like 5 years from now? If things continue the way they are, we’ll be just another cog in the great mass communications bordeom killing machine, titillating and entertaining our readers with our own snarky takes on the dirt dished by the MSM while our blogs are festooned with ads for everything from cold cream to the latest super-absorbent manifestation of Depends.
So much for citizen-journalists…
The blogs that jumped in on this hate machine have a ton a visibility, at least one was venerated by Time magazine. More important – the dirt they are dishing will have a long term echo because on the web, nothing is ever forgotten, and on the web, he (or she) who has the most inbound links, has the most influence. The sad thing is such hatred and partisanship draws MORE linkage and influence. And some who work for the the old guard are watching.
The Moderate Voice: Jill Carroll Hostage Case: A Black Eye To Blogging (UPDATED):
If each time a weblog screeches that X person hates America or X person is a fascist it gets kind of old — unless you are a member of a choir that wants to hear the same song over and over. There’s nothing wrong with that — but it does NOT enhance the credibility of blogs.
Do blogs want to be news analyzers? Opinion shapers? Political influencers? Or do they want to become like the very worst extreme left and extreme right talk show hosts? If the choice is the latter, then why shouldn’t the news media view blogs as a written by a bunch of hyperactive political activists who want to get their harsh opinions out there first no matter what so they attract attention to themselves?
Indeed. So ask youself again, how could washingtonpost.com accidentally hire a plagerist to launch a blog to represent the views of “the majority of Americans” (which was on purpose – their goal to open their opinion section to more “diverse” opinion)?
Because it is learning, ahead of the curve, how to exploit blogs, by the worst of its examples. They seem to realize that blogs are not a threat, but something to be embraced and extended.
Good for them, but bad for us as a society. We can promote services to our better angels, or decide that promotion by division is the way to gain influence and then riches.
David Weinberger: “Small Pieces Loosely Joined”: The conversation I believe we need to have is about what the Web is showing us about ourselves. What is true to our nature and what only looked that way because it was a response to a world that was, until now, the only one we had?
He wrote those words back in 2002. That conversation still needs to take place.
With no barriers to entry to share at the speed of thought… well is this our true nature?
Lord I hope not.
