Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail
By MATTHEW KLAM
Published: September 26, 2004
....just as Fox News has been creaming CNN, the traffic on (Mickey) Kaus's and (Andrew) Sullivan's sites has flat-lined recently, while Atrios's (Duncan Black's Eschaton) and (Markos) Moulitsas's (Daily Kos) are booming. Left-wing politics are thriving on blogs the way Rush Limbaugh has dominated talk radio, and in the last six months, the angrier, nastier partisan blogs have been growing the fastest. Daily Kos has tripled in traffic since June. Josh Marshall's site has quadrupled in the last year. It's almost as though, in a time of great national discord, you don't want to know both sides of an issue. The once-soothing voice of the nonideological press has become, to many readers, a secondary concern, a luxury, even something suspect. It's hard to listen to a calm and rational debate when the building is burning and your pants are smoking.
But at the same time that blogs have moved away from the political center, they have become increasingly influential in the campaigns -- James P. Rubin, John Kerry's foreign-policy adviser, told me, ''They're the first thing I read when I get up in the morning and the last thing I read at night.'' Among the Washington press corps, too, their impact is obvious. Back in 2002, Marshall helped stoke the fires licking at Trent Lott's feet, digging up old interviews that suggested his support for Strom Thurmond's racial policies went way back; Marshall's scoops found their way onto The Associated Press wire and the Op-Ed page of The New York Times. Earlier this month, a platoon of right-wing bloggers launched a coordinated assault against CBS News and its memos claiming that President Bush got special treatment in the National Guard; within 24 hours, the bloggers' obsessive study of typefaces in the 1970's migrated onto Drudge, then onto Fox News and then onto the networks and the front pages of the country's leading newspapers.
During the 1972 presidential campaign, Timothy Crouse covered the campaign-trail press corps in Rolling Stone magazine, reporting that he later expanded into his revealing and funny book ''The Boys on the Bus.'' Crouse described the way a few top journalists like R.W. Apple Jr., David S. Broder, Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, through their diligence, ambition and supreme self-confidence, set the agenda for the whole political race. This summer, sitting in the Tank and reading campaign blogs, you could sometimes get a half-giddy, half-sickening feeling that something was shifting, that the news agenda was beginning to be set by this largely unpaid, T-shirt-clad army of bloggers....
***
The news media helped create the modern campaign, and now they seem to be stuck in it. The bloggers, by contrast, adapted quickly. By the time the Republican convention rolled around in August, they had figured something out, staying far, far away from that zoo down at Madison Square Garden. They had begun to work the way news people do at manufactured news events, by sticking together, sharing information, repeating one another's best lines. They were learning their limitations, and at the same time they were digging around and critiquing and fact-checking and raising money. They still liked posting dirty jokes and goofy Photoshopped pictures of politicians, but they had hope, and more than a few new ideas, and they were determined to make themselves heard.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26BLOGS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
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