I read the full transcript. It is amazing how clueless the Media is to what is going on.
Meet The Blogs
: Jeff B. in the comments alerts us to a rather numbnutty discussion of blogs on Meet The Press; transcript here. The choicest moment is Roger Simon (not The Roger Simon, Our Roger Simon, the one who comes up first on Google, but the Other Roger Simon, the Dead Tree Roger Simon) insulting us all, which is to say the audience he wishes he had:
MR. RUSSERT: But you’re a blogger.
MR. SIMON: I am a blogger sort of. I mean, the difference between—look, a true blog is I woke up this morning, I decided to skip chem class, now I want to write about the last episode of “Friends.” That’s what blogs are. You know, it’s people talking to each other. My site is actually written columns. There’s a difference between writing and typing basically. Well, I mean, the theory between blogging is half correct. It’s everybody has an opinion and then the other half is: And everyone else wants to read about it. That’s not necessarily true. When I first put up the site, it got all these responses. I thought people wanted me to respond to them. They don’t. They want to talk to each other. And that has been the power that Dean has tapped into.
I go to the Other Roger Simon's nonblog and read this bit of keyboard self-abuse:
DALLAS CENTER, Iowa - - The snow blows in great gusts over the frozen furrows of the farm fields as Dick Gephardt's van pokes its way slowly through the blizzard.
Though we are just a few miles west of Des Moines, this is rural America, where the houses are few and far between and the tallest building on the horizon is always a grain elevator.
And I want to scream. That's not writing. That's wasting our time. That magazine should come with a tube of Vaseline.
I go to The Roger Simon and I find someone who, instead, knows he's talking to real people and gets to the point:
I dropped my car off for service today and it just so happened my mechanic was an Iranian, so I asked him if he had seen the "Frontline" piece on Iran on PBS last night and what he thought of it. "What shit!" he said concisely.
I agree.
The Other Roger has turned into just what he disdains and fears. He tells us about waking up in the morning and driving instead of getting to the point. He tries so hard to write that he ends up writing nothing. He fears a conversation with his audience and so he refuses to have one. This Other Roger is a dinosaur. In a million years, he will be petroleum. Then he will be petroleum jelly. Full circle.
: On the other hand, you have confessed dinosaur David Broder admitting he's no blogger but still respecting what's happening here:
MR. BRODER: Well, I am not and I never have blogged, and I’m going to get to the end of my career without blogging. I think...
MR. RUSSERT: Are you now or have you ever been a blogger, Broder?
MR. TODD: DavidBroder.com, we’re going to...
MR. BRODER: No, but I think it’s a tremendous tool, and it’s part of what is the healthiest trend in our politics, which is going back to personal communication, away from the mass media—forgive me, NBC. But I think the healthiest thing that’s going on now is people talking to people, either through the Internet or, as we’re seeing on the ground in Iowa, face-to-face communication.
MR. RUSSERT: Right. Writing letters, real-time democracy.
I have no idea what "real-time democracy" means but it sounds cool and that's why Russert says it. At least Broder is a good enough reporter to see something big happening here.
: I'm jumping around the transcript to snip the good bits. Here's how it starts:
MR. RUSSERT: ...One of the things that we will find out is just how truly effective is the Internet in this presidential race? Johns Hopkins University has already been studying it. Look at this: “The Use Of Blogs In The 2004 Presidential Election,” a study by Johns Hopkins University. [Link to PDF pf the report here -ed] And now for the computer illiterate crowd, this is a blog. This is Howard Dean’s blog. Here’s Wesley Clark’s blog. Here’s George W. Bush’s blog. And here to help us is Chuck Todd of National Journals Hotline. What is a blog?
MR. TODD: The actual term itself, by the way, is short for Web log. And, you know, you drop the W and you get the blog. [Well, to quibble, I hope no one starts calling these "eBlogs" -ed] I’ll just describe what Howard Dean’s blog since it’s the one that has the most traction and the most attention. It’s essentially like a digital bulletin board saying, “Hey, look, this is what we’re up to today. This is our message today. These are some of the things we’re doing today.” And then it allows a section to comment about what’s going on during the day. And this is where you find out who the bloggers are. These are these troops of people—Howard Dean, on any given posting, will have 150 to 200 comments per these posting. That means there’s probably about 80 to 100 people at any one time, they’re just chitchatting. It could be that they’re immediately responding to seeing Dean on television or they’re probably blogging right now while they’re watching us talking about them right now. No doubt probably they’re getting mad at us. They’re very anti-media. Reading the Dean blog is like reading Republican message points from years past and they’re anger toward the media. They felt very mad at NBC News and Lisa Myers over the last couple of days over the story, felt like somehow NBC News took his comments out of context. So it is a little...
MR. RUSSERT: Which Lisa Myers did not..
MR. TODD: No, not at all, but it was...
MR. RUSSERT: ...and the Dean campaign will acknowledge that.
MR. TODD: They acknowledge it. They did, but...
MR. RUSSERT: In effect, it’s a cyber-bulletin board.
MR. TODD: Yeah, exactly.
MR. RUSSERT: But now people who don’t like Howard Dean have occasionally gone up there and said some negative things and they are called trolls.
MR. TODD: You love this term, don’t you?
MR. RUSSERT: Correct?
MR. TODD: Yes, it is the term.
MR. RUSSERT: Roger Simon, when I say troll, I think of you.
Well, amen to that.
: They do agree that the Internet is a new and good way to raise money. They do all, even Simon, give props to the campaign for picking up organizing ideas from the Internet (using volunteers' unused cell minutes) and using the pesonal approach (those hand-written letters).
Toward the end, Ron Brownstein and cast look at what impact they think this Internet thing will have on the election.
MR. BROWNSTEIN: A long time before the Internet, Henry Luce said, “A magazine creates a community of interest that it did not know it existed.” And the blog does something of the same thing, but I think there’s a broader political question here, Tim. If you think of the blog as part of the overall phenomenon of the Internet growing in importance in politics, one question that has to be raised looking at Dean’s success is whether what it takes to succeed on the Internet and to generate this passion is inimical to what it takes to win a general election and to win over a lot of voters who are less passionate. Does it take a message and a persona that is so cutting and polarizing to attract attention on the Internet that you will then have trouble in November winning over the Senate. I mean, in the end, you need 50 million votes or so to win a presidential election and that’s a lot more people than you have at any given moment signing on to your blog....
MR. RUSSERT: You know, it’s so striking to me. When we had the big Internet bubble and everyone was saying, “The Internet’s the wave of the future and all the brick-and-mortar businesses are in trouble”—and the AOL Time Warner merger and on and on, and suddenly people said, “How do we make money off the Internet?” The question here is: Will the people who use the Internet, and talk to the blogs, will they show up on caucus night? Will they show up to vote? We have not seen it. We do not know. If they do, Howard Dean will win big. Ironically in all this, I was reading New Yorker magazine the other night, and at the end of 2002, Howard Dean himself said, “What’s a blog?”
Well, this chitchat assumes, wrongly, that (a) the Internet is for fringe opinions and (b) Internet users are Dean supporters. The logical extension of that is that Dean is fringe, but I'll leave that straightline aside. This is still stupidly generalizing.
IT'S JUST A TOOL, BOYS. Tools have no ideology or loyalty. Whether pamphleteering or phone canvassing or direct mail or the Internet or weblogs, they're just tools that are used wisely or not. Dean learned quickly and used them wisely. That says a lot about Dean -- and his people -- and little about the tools, you tools.
: Frustrating just reading that.
I'll tell you what the world needs: Another show: Meet the Blogs.
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