We Oughtta Be In Pictures

First things first; support your local artistic community. Chuck from Blogumentary has released his blogumentary, entitled Blogumentary. Go see it.

I'd like to go see it, actually, although time never permits.

A long time ago, Chuck asked the various members of the Northern Alliance Radio Network about filming one of our broadcasts. Except for the Powerguys, we all declined for a variety of reasons; the logistics of the studio down in The Bunker, doubt that Chuck would film our "good" sides...

...and, of course, the knowledge that whatever we said or did, it would inevitably be cut into a caricature designed for people who already had their minds made up about conservatives, and conservative bloggers, by an auteur who had our role in his film plotted out long before filming began.

As this review of Blogumentary shows, we probably weren't wrong.

The guy - his blog is called "Cheek", and it's on blogspot so I can't see it from work and get his actual name - writes:

And so the Blogumentary began...My favorite moment was when the whole crowd laughed uproariously as one of the PowerLine dudes [That'd be John "Rocket Man" Hinderaker - Ed.] sorta sneers and cocks his head briefly after an extravagant put-down of the New York Times...Fair and unbalanced, Chuck gives equal time to the right-wing dudes who bum-rushed their way up to Dan Rather's office...Despite my prole misgivings, I was impressed that Chuck portrayed the lefty blogosphere as activists and sturdy campaigners, while the right-wing pajama-boyz mostly fire quills at the New York Times and force Dan Rather to apologize to the world. In other words, the liberals are creators, and the conservatives of destroyers.

Where to start with this?

I haven't seen the movie yet; unaccountably, the Northern Alliance guys didn't get invited to the media screening. [Chuck - you gotta cover the little things in this business - Ed.] I'm not sure if Chuck Olsen portrayed last October's events as a "bum rush", or if Mr. Cheek just saw what he wanted to see, but it was more a matter of Powerline (and Little Green Footballs) catching Sixty Minutes in a bald-faced lie. Again, it's the little facts that count, here.

As to conservative bloggers "destroying" - wow. On the one hand, I suppose that all us guys in our pajamas and living rooms have to be careful so that we don't accidentally go and "destroy" any multi-billion-dollar media conglomerates. Kudos to Mr. Cheek and, if applicable, Chuck Olsen for preventing that.

On the other hand, if we can be accused, singularly (Powerline, Captain Ed) or collectively (conservative blogs as an institution) of playing a part in destroying the credibility of a corrupt institution, and mangling its ability to lie to the people with impunity, then I for my little part am happy to be a destroyer.

But in fact there is much more. Because it's in the "destruction" that we are indeed creating something much bigger; a huge, decentralized, omnimathic network of citizen journalists that is vastly greater than the sum of its parts. The parts - tens of thousands of engaged, intelligent people, each of them a jack of a few trades, a master perhaps of a few things - aren't journalists; we have day jobs. But together, piecing our disparate bits of knowledge together, we have the resources of a hundred newsrooms, the background of a dozen networks; we "know" more "stuff" than 25 million Nick Colemans...Colemen? Anyway, we are creating in the same way the schmuck minuteman at Concord created - by taking aim at a little piece of the status quo, and destroying it. We are bringing journalism - and the check and balance it provides to government - back to the citizens themselves, which is a key goal if democracy is to survive and thrive.

Finally, for all the palaver about Dean's internet campaign, the blogs of the right dominated the internet political game. They - we! - out-organized the Democrats online. We told a better story. And when the turning point of the campaign - the Swift Vets - came along, we were the ones who turned the flank of the mainstream media and the largely bought-and-paid-for heavyweight leftyblogs, and got the truth out to the people.

More importantly? We presented a front - a huge, discordant, unruly front, but a front nonetheless - that could appeal to people in and out of the Party, of all ages and places and walks of life; I would never dream of sending my (very Democrat) parents to cesspools like Daily Kos or Democratic Underground. For that matter, I'd be hard-pressed to find a lefty blog that would appeal to my various African-American, Hispanic and Asian friends, or older voters, or voters who weren't white, college-educated and middle-class, many of whom were on the fence politically; finding conservative blogs speaking to each of those niches was simple. Finding a blog for my liberal friends? Among the bigger leftyblogs, you can have any type of author you want, as long as he or she is middle-class, 22-35 years old, college-educated, and whose approach to political writing extends from the snark to the dismissive snark; I can't imagine the likes of Atrios, Oliver Willis, or Pandagon appealing to anyone outside that demographic or level of reading comprehension. The election seems to have unhinged even the next level of leftyblogs, the Matt Yglesiases and Josh "ua Micah" Marshalls; as a group, they all seem to be substituting chanting "Reality Based!" for actually basing their writing in reality. In short, they are aggressively exclusive in a way that conservative blogs as a group are not.

Both conservative and liberal blogs have their "attack" impulses; Cheek guy notes:

I relayed this epiphany to Chris Dykstra during the post-film crowd-spill, but then I realized that Chuck did include a bit about how Josh Marshall took down Trent Lott. So my theory is still a bit ragged, but probably right.

"Ragged" in the sense that as re stereotypes about conservatives and liberals in the blogosphere, it's completely wrong, but it's fair to say that both sides have their constructive and "destructive" motives.

The difference? Leftyblogs seem to try to find a way to fit into existing lefty hierarchies; notice the way the leftyblogs rushed to defend CBS? Of course, so many lefty bloggers are part of existing hierarchies; Atrios and Willis work for George Soros (it's a lot easier to blog when you know where your next paycheck is coming from); Drum and Yglesias and others depend for their livelihood on liberal publications.

Conservative blogs seem a lot more invididualistic (although I'll admit my impression comes from reading dozens of lefty blogs that each try harder than the last to try to ape Atrios' snarky, too-cool-for-school disdain for...everything).

As to documentaries? Go to see Blogumentary, Chuck's tale of "Pepys, laughs, contemplated suicides, bittersweet memories, gory injuries, Chuck's gigantic face, Sharyn's Little Man's even more gigantic face, fraudulent identities, thrusts, parrys, bald dudes, cats", of political inside baseball with Joe Trippi and whatever. And then think about this; there's another great story to be told here. Powerline and Captain Ed and Charles Johnson's David Versus Goliath struggles against the big media, and the growth of a genuinely organic media that is slowly slipping the bonds of traditional blogging (the NARN is only the beginning) and infuriatingly impervious to the bloviation of the bigs...

...you know. The story that Blogumentary apparently doesn't tell at all (or so it seems). The story you don't see in the major media, or anywhere else but in thousands of conservative blogs, and one blogger-driven radio show.

Posted by Mitch at November 23, 2004 05:45 PM | TrackBack