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The Markos RegimeWhy Kos shouldn't believe the hype.

By John Dickerson
Posted Monday, June 12, 2006, at 6:41 PM ET

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Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty. Click image to expand.

After Markos Moulitsas got the mildly vinegary Maureen Dowd treatment, he was a little ticked. "Maureen Dowd is an insecure, catty bitch," he told a fellow blogger. OK, maybe he was more than a little ticked. (By blogger standards, Dowd's attack was a Swedish massage.) But the founder of DailyKos soon moved on. "I reach more people than most of these publications that are interviewing me—I don't need them."

I hope Moulitsas doesn't let go of his snotty arrogance too easily. One of the healthiest things about the left-wing blogosphere is its confrontational dislike of the mainstream media. There's a distinction here with the media's critics on the right. At some level, the right doesn't much like that the press exists. They don't want to fix it, they want to drive a stake through its heart. The left, on the other hand, just wishes the establishment press would do a better job. The Kos-type critique of the media is intertwined with its passion about politics. When the press gets it wrong, left-wing bloggers believe, the people are ill-informed and democracy suffers. There's respect in that anger, though you wouldn't always know it if you're the target of one of their flaming arrows. (Sometimes they apologize.)

Markos Moulitsas. Click image to expand.

With the completion of YearlyKos, the first convention for the 500,000 unique visitors the site claims to get daily, bloggers now face the problem all outsider movements encounter when they go mainstream. Can the astute elements of their critique survive their newfound legitimacy? Or, to put the matter somewhat differently, can the bloggers remain jerks to the press, when the press is busy swooning over them? 

There is no doubt about the swoon—the mainstream media is now as taken with bloggers as it was with John McCain in January 2000. YearlyKos swarmed with the top writers in the mainstream political press establishment. Meet the Press invited Moulitsas on to talk for a segment about blogger power. If one of the newsmagazines isn't right now planning a few pages on "The 25 Most Influential Political Bloggers," I'll eat my copy of Floater.

Of course, there's no question that bloggers are becoming influential in the political process, at least on the Democratic side. YearlyKos showed all the signs of the arrival of an important new constituency—politicians courting support, big media interviews, and mountainous self-referential coverage in the blogsosphere itself. It looks like a big movement to me.

But political reporters are notorious suckers for this kind of novel new underground movement—soccer moms, NASCAR dads, exurban voters. Journalists respond especially gullibly to the arrival of new constituencies with an air of prairie-fire authenticity. Some of these movements, like the Proposition 13 tax revolt in California, turn out to be as transformative as the avatars predict, and more so. But a larger number of them—like the "Rock the Vote" youth registration movement—turn out to be massively overblown, hype phenomena with little lasting impact.

Another positive quality of the blogging community is its general allergy to unsupported media hype. But can bloggers maintain their skeptical posture when it's their 15 minutes of fame? Will the bloggers denounce the mainstream media coverage of their movement when the message is that blogging activists are, as Markos puts it, a "force to be reckoned with" and not the "far left extremist wackos that everybody seems to think we are." The test is not whether bloggers can catch the mainstream media mischaracterizing activists in the blogosphere. That's too easy. The test is whether bloggers will keep the press honest about the real, measurable political impact of the blogosphere. So far the results are not earthshattering.

It's not in bloggers' short-term interest to knock down the story of their own throw-weight, but it may be to their long-term benefit. Not only do bloggers lose standing as critics if they stop being critical, but insufficient wariness will lead to an inevitable messy breakup. Media infatuations never last. When expectations get too high, the press reverses itself, because one of the laws of journalism is that the story has to change. In this case, political reporters will turn on bloggers if the promised revolution doesn't materialize in the form of a Democratic sweep in the midterms. We are probably just under five months away from a wave of coverage positing that bloggers weren't that powerful after all. After we build up the Markos regime, we will help to tear it down.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty; photograph of Markos Moulitsas by Paul Delehanty.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Just exactly who is Markos Moulitsas? Having watched him for an hour on C-Span he appears to be a blackwearing (anarchist) no experience bomb thrower bent on destroying the Democrat party. Not that that upsets me but his basic premises are false. He opines that the progressives are the salvation of the nation. Sounds like Socialism, yes with a capital "S".

We can argue about the liberal versus conservative split but the progressives are a fringe bordering on a cult that is much, much smaller than the Christian Right.

--stock

(To reply, click here.)

DailyKos and FreeRepublic [are] two peas in a pod.

Both are full of rabid wingnuts. Both engage in intense censorship of any political views that even smell moderate. Both encourage extreme partisanship as a remedy for everything that ails this country. Both enforce strict adherence to the approved agenda through the purging of anyone who shows even an iota of independent thought. Both are completely incompatible with mainstream America that prefers compromise and moderation, not extremism. Both blame the mainstream media for anything short of not supporting their views, yet it is the partisan blogs who try to control and channel the energy of the masses into the political direction that favors them.

Like Jon Stewart once said to the hosts of Crossfire: "You're destroying America."

Commander_in_Chimp

(To reply, click here.)

A web loggger is just some person who writes an article and posts it on the web, a news/media columnist is a live person that you can see, hear, and complain to in person if you want.

Who is that web logger? Some paranoid schizophrenic? A highly intelligent person who never cared to go mainstream? A flaky psuedo-intellectual that sounds cool and confident but doesn't really know much at all? That's the basic problem with web loggers, unlike their mainstream counterparts, they don't necessarily have to report to someone - someone who has checked their credentials beforehand. You can't get a job as a reporter or columnist if you are completely inept, heck even those copycats at the NYT have SOME journalistic talent that is well documented. But what about that 'logger, heck he could be a she, it could be two people, it could be an MIT computer science grad programming an AI for his PhD.

--Eigenvector

(To reply, click here.)

Does the Right really want to destroy the fifth estate? No, of course it doesn't. The Right is highly skeptical of the press in general, "nattering neigh bobs of negativisms" as one on the Right once called them, but they do not wish to see the press taken down. In fact, it is the Left who are crying about Fox News and the radio right.

Both sides have complaints, many legitimate, but neither side is looking for the wholesale destruction of the press. It is unnecessary and careless lines like Dickerson's that piss off people on the Right.

--IMKessel

(To reply, click here.)

If only the MSM was liberally biased, we would be better served than what we are getting now. Blogging has done more to improve journalism than all the letters to editors, ombudsmen, public editors, and ethics in journalism courses in college combined. [...]

Bloggers are here to stay whether or not the lefty's can deliver come this November. We'll still reduce pompous asses like Trent Lott and Dan Rather and marginalize the likes of Judith Miller.

Blogging is the best thing to happen to journalism since the First Amendment.

--scout29c

(To reply, click here.)

(6/13)


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