…for MotherJones.com that “The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged.” He depicts online commentary as a tertiary exercise of homebound pundit-wannabes snapping frenetically against the outrages of other homebound pundit-wannabes; an “online echo chamber” unsuited for “real” in-the-field reporting, or for the types of research that can’t be accomplished via search engines.
And Packer dismisses the type of three-dot prose seen on sites such as this one:
“I gorge myself on these hundreds of pieces of commentary like so much candy into a bloated — yet nervous, sugar-jangled — stupor. Those hours of out-of-body drift leave me with few, if any, tangible thoughts. Blog prose is written in headline form to imitate informal speech, with short emphatic sentences and frequent use of boldface and italics. The entries, sometimes updated hourly, are little spasms of assertion, usually too brief for an argument ever to stand a chance of developing layers of meaning or ramifying into qualification and complication. There’s a constant sense that someone (almost always the blogger) is winning and someone else is losing. Everything that happens in the blogosphere — every point, rebuttal, gloat, jeer, or “fisk” (dismemberment of a piece of text with close analytical reading) — is a knockout punch. A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. They are also nearly without exception men (this form of combat seems too naked for more than a very few women). I imagine them in neat blue shirts, the glow from the screen reflected in their glasses as they sit up at 3:48 a.m. triumphantly tapping out their third rejoinder to the WaPo’s press commentary on Tim Russert’s on-air recap of the Wisconsin primary.”
I beg, as I often do, to differ.
Packer’s analysis isn’t so much wrong as it is incomplete. Perhaps, as a pundit himself, he’s drawn toward those blogs that specialize commentary about commentators. But there are countless others, as well, in which people write intimately about their own lives and their own political experience. There are others, such as Progressive Review, which link to direct reporting on important issues.
What the Web doesn’t currently have is a lot of original, online-only or online-first, direct reportage. In the post-dot-com-crash era, budgets are tight for such labor-intensive content gathering. All the top “news” sites are outgrowths of print, broadcast, and cable news organizations.
One possible answer could be found in old-time radio. As revealed at radio history sites, the early network radio “newscasts,” just before and during WWII, were pundit-heavy. Individual commentators lucidly talked for up to fifteen minutes, in the studio or (via shortwave relay) on location. But they’d done their homework before the came to the mike. The studio-bound commentators were often scholars and historians; even those without postgraduate degrees still read up about whatever they were discussing. Commentaries from the field, such as those of Edward R. Murrow, went out and witnessed events they later talked about. They didn’t use “sound bites,” which didn’t really emerge until the spread of tape recording after the war.
This original concept of “eyewitness news” could become the next step in web journalism.
