The Right-Wing Blog Operatives

There seems to have been some weirdly negative reaction to Garance Franke-Ruta's article on right-wing bloggers and internet activists, especially on one of my favorite new sites, Personal Democracy Forum. I thought it was a very interesting article, with a lot of good research, as was Michael Crowley's piece on how these blog-operatives bully local media.

The criticism of Franke-Ruta's piece seemed to be mostly provoked by people who thought she was making a big point, which they disagreed with -- e.g. right-wing bloggers bad/left-wing good, or bloggers aren't real journalists. Maybe there was a little too much language indicating she was trying to make a generalized point, but mostly it was just a story -- that is, journalism, check it out -- about some people and the things they did. James D. Guckert, Maryland GOP slime artist Joseph Steffen, the Powerline guys, the Daschle-v-Thune bloggers and some other right-wing operative-bloggers have a somewhat similar M.O. -- they're not quite who they appear to be, they operate somewhat under the radar screen, they are financed in dubious ways, they collaborate in a fairly deceptive way with political operatives. And she put these stories together at a level of detail I had never seen before, allowing me to see some parallels. I'll leave it to her to answer specific charges of inaccuracy, but on the whole, the story was very revealing.

This is related to the issues of political coordination raised in previous posts here. One good suggestion that came up in comments was that there might be a kind of code-of-conduct for blogs, to disclose any relationship with a political campaign. I think that's an idea worth considering. Perhaps Bloglines or technorati or a similar aggregator site that people want their stuff to appear on could mark certain blogs as adhering to a basic code of ethics, or answering certain core questions that a reader might want to know, not limited to political campaign affiliations: Is producing this blog part of your job responsibilities? Do you make a living in a company/industry/campaign that is related to the topics you write about? Do you have other affiliations relevant to your blog? etc. It would be a certification somewhat similar to the "Real Name" badge that can be used on Amazon reviews.

I've come to think that there are a number of reasons blogs can be a superior forum, for both readers and writers, than most op-ed pages. Flexibility of format is one advantage; another is that readers feel they know more about where the author is coming from, which is always the key to reading critically. I can put the opinions of, say, Brad DeLong in perspective, in part because I know his credentials, but also because I feel like I know him a little bit, his assumptions -- certainly far more than I would know from an author ID on an op-ed: "the author is a professor of economics at Berkeley and a former Treasury Department official." Like the vast majority of bloggers, I let enough of my life in that people know what my job is as well as previous jobs. They probably know that I've worked on one political campaign as an adult, and for eight years drew a paycheck from George Soros's Open Society Institute -- so I'm waiting for the right-wing to start labeling this "the Soros-Funded Decembrist," as they recently have started doing with David Brock's Media Matters For America, even though Brock is explicitly NOT funded by Soros or his foundation. (In fact, I'm beginning to wonder who I have to sleep with to make it onto David Horowitz's "Discoverthenetwork.com"? I might have to switch over to the dark side so I can at least get a slot on John Holbo's hilarious DiscovertheNutwork.com)

Anyway, all that aside, I guess this is nothing more than the old "On the Internet No One Knows You're a Dog" problem, but it does seem like the right is a little better at using the medium as an extension of shady attack politics, as opposed to straight-up, DailyKos-style attack politics. Both Franke-Ruta and Crowley capture some of that weird subculture.