Planting Liberally

As I mentioned in Wednesday's post introducing the concept of liberal entrepreneurship, my new focus in liberal entrepreneurship will culminate in a series discussing various ideas which liberal entrepreneurs can pick up and run with. In particular, one topic I am very interested in is growing the progressive blogosphere. In some ways, we can think of progressive bloggers as small-time entrepreneurs (or, in the case of Dailykos, FireDogLake, and others, big-time entrepreneurs). They are providing a service and many of them seek to make a bit of money off of it, usually through ads, book buy programs, and merchandising. Usually it's not nearly enough to quit the day job, but it's certainly a nice little bonus on the side. I am in the midst of kicking around some ideas for making blogging much more lucrative, but that's a topic for another post. More to the point, bloggers serve the progressive movement in myriad ways. At a most basic level, bloggers serve as information and opinion-spreaders, in much the same way as Roper's influentials or a cross between Gladwell's mavens and connectors. In subtle ways, I think the sheer mass of the progressive blogosphere is also important because it pushes the bleeding edge of web technology, making new technological changes more friendly to progressive causes. That's also a topic for another post. Small-time bloggers are most powerful, however, when they occupy and cover in-depth a particular niche, whether it be geographical, institutional or topical. Niche-covering is powerful for several reasons. Occasionally, lightning strikes, and an obscure topic takes on immense importance in national political discourse. At times like these, it's important to have someone "on the scene" who already knows a lot about the topic. Moreover, bloggers serve as important reminders to those in power that someone is watching them. Having a vigilant blogger watching (let's say) every city council in the country would at least put councilors on notice that their actions can be kept in the dark. Geographical niches are the obvious niche for bloggers to occupy, and many of them do it quite well. (I used to run a blog that covered Cambridge, MA politics, but I've more or less let it slide.) Leftyblogs has done a good job of making local blogging attractive and fun, and there are potentially other ways to do the same. Indeed, I'd even say that geographical niches are also the most important niches for bloggers to occupy. Imagine if every city council in the country really did have a hawkish blogger covering them! But I think that topical or institutional blog-niches are also very important, and in my new series, I hope to suggest, from time to time, interesting niches of this sort which bloggers can occupy. To get things going, I'll start with the idea of hounding right-wing media institutions. Media Matters does a good job of this from a "bird's eye" view, cataloging and protesting some of the most egregious overreaches in the conservative media machine. More interesting but less well-known, in my view, is the (ahem) doggedly vigilant News Hounds blog ("we watch Fox so you don't have to). The News Hounds covers Fox day-in and day-out, and provides a lower-level granularity of information about the network. Of course, Fox watchdog-ism is not the exclusive province of the News Hounds. For example, the website for Robert Greenwald's excellent movie, Outfoxed, also keeps a vigilant eye on Fox, and has recently taken part in the effort to cancel the Nevada Democrats/Fox News presidential debate. And dozens of progressive bloggers will occasionally report on one Fox outrage or another. Fox News is such a massive part of the media machine that more watchdogs are always better. I think that Fox is not the only conservative media outlet which deserves to be placed under the microscope. Why not watch them all? In other words, why not create a series of blogs dedicated to watching conservative media outlets of all stripes? The outlets covered could include:

• Print sources, especially the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, the Washington Times, and the New York Post;
• Radio channels, especially Rush Limbaugh and his imitators;
• Well-known broadcast personalities, like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly;
• Conservative pundits, ranging from the "respectable" Bill Kristol to the more obviously crazy Ann Coulter, and emerging personalities like Mary Katharine Ham

Imagine a network of watchdog blogs, all dedicated to following and debunking these conservative media sources on a regular basis. It would be fairly easy for a dedicated blogger or group of bloggers to subscribe to the feeds for each outlet. Debunking the message of the day might or might not be difficult, but certainly pointing out the more obnoxious, outrageous, or flatly wrong comments would be. Moreover, after a while such bloggers would begin to pick up on the various mannerisms, habits, and internal organizational weaknesses of the outlet in question. The benefits of such an enterprise are numerous. First, any outlet being dogged in that way would eventually become aware that they're being watched; even a conservative media outlet is bound to become self-conscious of that kind of scrutiny. Second, the most outrageous comments could be used against the outlet, to trigger boycotts, protests or, in the most egregious cases (usually involving threats of violence, which the conservative media is all too happy to peddle), legal action. Third, such an effort would amount to a massive Google bomb of the conservative media, particularly as regards to more minor figures; every search for "Mary Katharine Ham" would eventually pull up the watchdog group dedicated to her as a high-ranking result. Fourth, when one outlet or the other really goes over the top - when "lightning strikes", as it did for Ann Coulter recently - the watchdog group could spring into action and assist the more big-shot progressive blogs in taking action. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the watchdog group could be a source of good research on the outlet, and could assist progressives who have to face that outlet with information about how to exploit its weaknesses, understand its most common talking points, and effectively persuade its audiences. Further, I should add, scrutinizing the conservative media might not actually be the most profitable approach. You could argue that scrutinizing "Third Way" Democratic media outlets - ranging from The New Republic to James Carville - might actually be even more useful. For one thing, they are less numerous than the conservative media outlets, and therefore it's easier to keep track of them all. But the real trouble with Third Way Democratic media representatives is that they masquerade as progressives, sometimes fooling progressives into thinking they are true allies. I'm sure plenty of liberals have seen Carville dozens of time on TV and thought that he is a good representative of progressive values. He simply is not, and the progressive blogosphere has done a great job of discrediting him in recent months. (His rather irrational call for the resignation of Howard Dean after the Democratic party's emphatic victory last year didn't help his cause either.) But there are other low-profile Third Way Democrats, like Susan Estrich, who are flying under the radar; they must be tracked. Regardless, the important point is that there are many institutional niches waiting for progressive bloggers to fill. Anyone who thinks that media activism is an important cause should consider creating a blog to track a conservative or Third Way Democratic media outlet.