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In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, hundreds of
blogs focused solely on the war, grappling with first-person
accounts from New York and Washington, D.C., reports
from Afghanistan, and commentary about the shifting
face of American foreign policy. As interest in the
Bush administration’s war on terror has waxed
and waned — replaced by concerns about the economy
and attention to an impending presidential election
— the “blogosphere” has flexed its
muscles and focused on domestic politics.
Today, some of the most prolific American blogs have
readerships in the hundreds of thousands, enabling them
to punch well above their weight in three critical ways:
by bypassing the editorial boards of the mainstream
press and writing directly to their audience, by skewering
the media and leaving no misguided opinion or erroneous
press report unchecked, and by goading the mainstream
media into pursuing political stories that fly below
the radar.
For example, so quick were some blogs to pick up on
Sen. Trent Lott’s thinly veiled advocacy of racial
segregation last year that the controversy was injected
into the mainstream media, where it gathered steam and
led to Lott’s resignation.
More recently, the critical examination of President
Bush’s National Guard service was ignited by evidence
produced by the blog Calpundit.
Thus, in a feverish election year in which the votes
of many Libertarians and socially liberal, pro-war voters
remain up for grabs, the most influential blogs likely
will sway the hearts and minds of many impressionable
swing voters between now and November.
In Britain, however, things are quite different. Although
British blogging slowly has caught on, and a large number
of blogs also emerged soon after Sept. 11 (including
some started by expatriate Americans providing their
own trenchant analysis of allied foreign policy and
Fleet Street’s kaleidoscopic dissection of the
war on terror), no British blog yet can claim to be
as important an influence on domestic political debate
as the American analogues.
But that might be changing. In the past six months,
several British think tanks, politicians, and newspaper
columnists (the Daily Mail’s Melanie
Phillips and The Independent’s Johann
Hari) have started blogging. Mimicking the Stateside
success of bloggers-cum-professors Glenn
Reynolds and Eugene
Volokh, a University of Manchester professor of
government Norman
Geras, has seen his profile rise recently, as have
columnist Stephen
Pollard, conservative commentator Peter
Cuthbertson, and the group blogs Harry’s
Place and Vox
Politics.
The question is: Will this emerging echelon of British
blogging be able to shape political debate in as indomitable
manner as the likes of Mickey
Kaus, Josh
Marshall, and Andrew
Sullivan in the United States? Several impediments
stand in the British blogosphere’s way.
First, given the traditional left-liberalism of the
American media, the blog proved to be the ideal vehicle
for paranoid right-wingers to attack perceived media
bias. Not to be outdone, liberal blogs retaliated with
their own exposure of slanted news coverage. But in
Britain, a plethora of daily newspapers already cover
the full spectrum of political thought and make no pretence
toward objectivity, thus prohibiting the broader appeal
of a subversive blogosphere. In other words, if you
don’t like what The Guardian thinks about the
proposed European Union constitution or the occupation
of Iraq, you can find a different perspective in The
Daily Telegraph.
Second, no issue has dominated a nation’s political
and intellectual landscape in recent years as dramatically
as the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. If the
traumatic events of 2½ years ago provided the
spark for the rapid rise of the American political blogosphere,
the Bush administration’s war on terror and the
fierce debates that followed merely added fuel to the
fire of American bloggers’ activity.
By contrast, the British public’s response to
the war on terror has been less polarized and its political
debate less passionate than America’s. Consequently,
the interest in and the influence of British blogs have
been substantially weaker.
Although such issues as Britain’s continued presence
in the Middle East and a closely fought general election
next year could raise their profile, without a national
trauma as galvanizing as the Sept. 11 attacks and a
controversial foreign policy response to match it, British
political blogs are unlikely to reach beyond a niche
audience.
Finally, perhaps the greatest impediment to the success
and influence of political blogs is good, old-fashioned
British cynicism. “Why would anyone want the cyberspace
equivalent of being trapped with the pub bore as he
details his enlightened opinions on everything from
Iraq to the [London traffic] congestion charge?”
asked The Guardian’s Matthew Tempest last year,
from deep within a glass house.
Yet, why on earth would anyone want an intellectual
diet consisting solely of the self-righteous platitudes
of The Guardian and The Independent or the right-wing
bromides of The Daily Telegraph and The Times, to say
nothing of the BBC’s condescension or the titillating
trash of cable and satellite news?
But that’s apparently the way people like it.
In a recent discussion in The Guardian, popular blogger
Rhodri Marsden
admitted that her aim is to “write about mundane
stuff in a way that would make entertaining reading,”
before adding tellingly that, “If you try and
write about the news, you’ll inevitably come across
like a third-rate leader-page columnist.”
No wonder much of the British blogosphere is dull,
prosaic and disenchanting. Marsden’s attitude
is simply anathema to the thousands of bloggers whose
ideas and opinions and desire to connect with others
are shaping the political and intellectual current of
modern America. Regrettably, as long as blogging is
perceived as little more than a vanity project for verbose
technophiles, or as a vehicle for sharing our most meaningless
dear-diary observations, British political debate surely
will suffer.
The
Raw Story is the liberal alternative to Drudge,
culling and composing progressive breaking news from
around the world. Our main page and story index can
be found here.
The author can be reached at: jamesclasper@hotmail.com.
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