I used to question why I blog and what good will come of it. Hopefully, we are all careful to do our jobs each day and not let blogging affect our responsibilities. I know I have to remind myself of that often.
I can’t even call myself a novice blogger; I only express my simple points of view. I began blogging for personal and spiritual reasons, to clear my mind of frustrations that had bogged me down for a couple of years or more. It was an unexpected blessing to discover various groups of bloggers, most of whom shared my same thoughts and experiences! Praise God…I didn’t expect that at all. I just wanted to write down my thoughts, so that I could move forward in my faith, my parenting and my life.
The Proclamation
I first read this proclamation on another blog. It immediately caught my eye and I expected to see it in other blogs. I’ve been watching for a few weeks and no one has picked up on this term.
Terrie of Every Opinion is the first blogger on record to proclaim, on 9/25/04 in her post A Blogger’s Debt, 2004 as The Year of the Blogger.
“I predict that 2004 will be remembered as the Year of the Blogger, immortalized by a network of self-published forensic journalists who deconstructed lies and hoaxes accepted uncritically by the mainstream media.”
Terrie might not have been the first to discuss the importance of the blogger this year, but a search of Technorati deems her the first to proclaim it officially.
A week and a half after Terrie’s post, Doug Kern posted an article linking the Reformation and the emergence of the blogosphere in a post titled, “Here I Blog, I Can Do No Other”, at Tech Central Station does all but name 2004 as our year. As a Lutheran, I really enjoyed his comparision of the emergence of blogging to Luther’s reformation of the church.
Buoyed by the ascendancy of a new information technology, a revolution against the mainstream media (MSM) is underway. What began as a modest effort to reform the excesses of the MSM evolves into a total rejection of the MSM’s right to mediate and interpret the truth. Bewildered by its huge loss of prestige, and embarrassed by its increasingly obvious shortcomings, the MSM alternately dismisses the revolution and lashes out against it. Slowly but inevitably, a new understanding emerges. Lay people realize that they have both the ability and the duty to find the truth on their own, free from the biases of a corrupt and self-serving institution. As the unrivalled authority of the MSM has collapsed, the MSM must curb its excesses and return to its primitive purity — or collapse under the weight of its arrogance.
We’re talking about 2004, the Internet, the blogosphere, and the big news reporting agencies, right?
Wrong. We’re talking about the sixteenth century, the printing press, the first Protestants, and the Roman Catholic Church.
On 9/27/04, James Lileks refers to a 9/26/04 NYTimes Magazine article which mentions 2004 as The Year of the Blogger, but doesn’t promote the article as being about that proclamation.
Will We Fade Away?
According to a recent article by the StarTribune we will fade away.
“…the bloggers’ moment in the sun may be brief, as the novelty of what they do fades and they become co-opted by mainstream journalists and politicians. “They’re going to get sucked into the system,” … “Politicians are figuring out how to absorb them, so they may eventually fade a bit.”
We bloggers know that won’t happen; we’re just getting started in our new format. We are the ones who used to call talk radio to rant to the host about our pet peeve issue. In our blogs, we finally found a pulpit that works and we have developed formal and informal networks around our issues.
Who We Are
Rush Limbaugh on the blogosphere:
The people who make this country work are people you’ll never meet, people whose names you’ll never know, because they’re just toiling away living their lives, trying to do the best they can against whatever obstacles they face. They’re not seeking fame and they’re not finding it, and nobody is making stories about them, but the vast, vast, vast majority of the people in this country who make it work will never, ever be known nationally. Known by their friends, known by their communities and neighbors, but who are these people? These are not people that exist in the ebb and flow of media every day, they don’t have time for it. They are people who have their own passions; they have their own dreams, and they’re out there following them every day. They’re out there living their lives. And if they’ve got time for media they squeeze it in whenever. Some people more than others, but I’ll tell you, if everybody is watching TV all day we wouldn’t have the GDP we do. If everybody was listening to radio all day we wouldn’t have the GDP we do.
…this group of people that we never will ever know, these people are not seeking fame, these people are just making the country work, they live in a society which permits ordinary people to do extraordinary things. That’s one of my favorite phrases to describe this country: ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things, every day. It happens every day in this country. We wouldn’t be the country we are if it weren’t happening.
What We Are Accomplishing
It’s not really necessary to list the recent accomplishments of bloggers; they’re in the news every day. Everyone knows the big stories, from the infamous Dan Rather story a few weeks ago to the Al Quqaa story of today. Bloggers are keeping mainstream media and politicians on their toes. Maybe the tide of lying to get elected will finally change.
We even get backhanded compliments. John Hinderaker of Minneapolis’ own Powerline posts the following on the role of bloggers:
Today’s New York Times looks at the role of bloggers in keeping the mainstream media honest. Well, that’s not quite how they put it:
Practicing cheap and dirty politics, playing fast and loose with the facts and even lying: Accusations like these, and worse, have been slung nonstop this year.
The accused in this case are not the candidates, but the mainstream news media. And the accusers are an ever-growing army of Internet writers, many of them partisans, who reach hundreds of thousands of people a day.
Journalists covering the campaign believe the intent is often to bully them into caving to a particular point of view. They insist the efforts have not swayed them in any significant way, though others worry the criticism could eventually have a chilling effect.
I think it would be a wonderful thing if our efforts chilled journalists sufficiently so that they would stop making things up and passing off forged documents.
Power Line gets a mention near the end:
Most political reporters interviewed for this article insisted that outside forces did not sway them from being fair, though a couple admitted they could not rule out having pulled punches in small and even subconscious ways.
Some effects are more obvious.
When “60 Minutes” reported on documents purporting to show Mr. Bush received preferential treatment in the Air National Guard, questions about the documents’ authenticity originated and caught fire on the FreeRepublic and Power Line blog Web sites; mainstream outlets followed. CBS News admitted two weeks later that it could not authenticate the documents. The NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recently likened the tone of the Internet coverage of the CBS National Guard report, presented by the anchor Dan Rather, to a “political jihad.” In an interview last week Mr. Brokaw said CBS News had clearly made mistakes. But, he said, “I think there were people just lying in the Internet bushes, waiting to strike, and I think that particular episode gave them a big opportunity.”
In other words, we were right, but we’re still somehow blameworthy because we were “waiting to strike.” That’s an interesting standard; does it apply when the mainstream media puts out hit pieces on Republicans? All we ever ask is that news sources like the Times, CBS and NBC get the facts right and not make stuff up. Why doesn’t the same standard apply to us?
I’ll discuss this with Mr. Brokaw when I see him next week.
By the way, it’s interesting that one of the main themes of the Times article is the abusive language and personal attacks that are directed against reporters and news outlets by bloggers. In fact, though, every single instance of a personal or abusive attack cited in the article came from the left.
Congratulations to all bloggers! Be proud of yourselves!
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