Setting the Record Straight

I just had an interesting chat with Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect about her new article "Blogged Down," which details how conservatives have been working the political blogosphere in recent months. Most of the conversation was off-the-record, though I think it would be fair to characterize it as me trying to convince Garance that her frame of "originally pristine citizen-blogosphere corrupted by stealth Republican political operatives" was a misreading of events, and her defending the traditional lines dividing old-fashioned reportorial journalism from online opinionating/activism and arguing that not all political blogging was as innocent or independent a phenomenon as the hype would have it.

I called Garance because I have generally enjoyed her reporting--she was one of the best of the few who covered the world of online politics in the last cycle, and her recent piece on how John Kerry is hogging his campaign's email list, while the Bush campaign has managed to share its with the RNC made me jealous (that is, it would have been a perfect PDF feature).

A lot of her new piece talks about Mike Krempasky, a PDF contributing editor and very busy fellow in the conservative online trenches (the latter being a very good reason for the former). I'll leave it to Mike to point out whatever errors Garance may have made (he cites one misquote here and promises a longer response, though if he wants he could just use her article to raise his speaking fees at the conservative conclaves). But I do want to note one problem that Garance said she would correct in the Prospect's print version of the story, which hadn't yet gone to press.

After describing the history of Richard Viguerie and Terry Dolan's Democrat-bashing, she writes, "Now a new generation is carrying on the work that these men started. The day [Eason] Jordan resigned, Krempasky joined the online liberal discussion group Personal Democracy Forum, creating a new category, “The Dark Side,” to discuss the new potential of online “Open Source Opposition Research.” She then quotes from Mike's post on that topic, though the way she does it makes Mike's point seem more sinister than it was. (He was interested in discussing whether the greater level of transparency guaranteed by Google + net-roots activism would either hurt the political process, because no one but the perfect would ever run for office, or make it more healthy by allowing people to be "more open and up front with their own imperfections, instead focusing on policy"--she seems to want to show that Mike's style of activism was to celebrate the tearing down of candidates with embarrassing pictures or boneheaded quotes.)

Franke-Ruta's clear mistake was to impute Mike's tagging of his post under the headings of "campaigns and elections" and "the dark side" with his creating a new category for the blog called "the dark side." When I explained to her how our tagging system works she immediately apologized for the error and promised to fix it.

As for the larger point about all of this: My takeaway from her reporting and that of others is that there are savvy and creative net-activists on both sides of the political aisle these days, and some of them are dirty tricksters and others are pretty above-board about what they're doing and who, if anyone, is paying them.

Her piece, in my view, may overstate how much Republican operatives are working the web, though this may also be a reflection of how richly populated (and compensated?) the Republican side of the political spectrum is after a few decades of concerted infrastructure- and movement-building. She is certainly right that mainstream journalists have scarcely done their homework in finding out how the new net-politics works, or reporting who the new online activists really are. But if the Claremont Institute's conservative mission has a new lease on life because three of its fellows have reinvented themselves as the Powerline blog, the story is not so much that they're pulling the wool over their readers, or the media's, eyes, as it is that as bloggers they have found a way to connect with a large audience and popularize a point of view that an otherwise stodgy think-tank approach failed to do.

Finally, her piece illustrates, yet again, the importance of full disclosure on the part of online activists and the concurrent importance of informed skepticism on the part of online consumers.