There is an old newsroom proverb: journalism is the first draft of history. It’s only partly true (and even that only some of the time), but it makes journalists feel good about themselves and lends a sheen of importance to a job that often amounts to little more than mobile clerical work. This is particularly true when it comes to the stenography that often passes for political campaign journalism: Step 1: Get press pass, Step 2: follow candidate around, Step 3: write down what candidate says, Step 4: write down what people other than candidate say, Step 5: complain, Step 6: file story, Step 7: eat and drink on someone else’s dime, repeat.
The formula for this type of coverage was laid down almost forty years ago in Timothy Crouse’s now classic “The Boys on the Bus”, his account of the pack of reporters on the 1972 presidential campaign trail. A more recent example is Alexandra Pelosi’s “Journeys with George”, her documentary about Bush the Younger’s 2000 campaign. The issues and the proper nouns changed somewhat from ’72 to ’00, but the style of campaign coverage (see preceding paragraph) largely did not.
Now we have Eric Boehlert’s new book, “Bloggers on the Bus”. He’s quite intentionally cribbed his title from Crouse and it’s a fitting choice because Boehlert, like Crouse before him, is explaining a new group of politically influential people to a general audience. The lefty bloggers Boehlert profiles will never have the kind of influence that the boys on Crouse’s bus once did, but nobody’s going to have that again. Instead, Boehlert documents how these people, variously referred to here and elsewhere as the “progressive blogosphere” or the “netroots”, carved out their own slice of the influence pie.
“Bloggers on the Bus” begins with left wing bloggers successful 2007 effort to force the Nevada Democratic Party to drop its plans for a primary debate on Fox News. It keeps going from there. Here we see the bloggers humiliate Chris Matthews (aka Tweety) for being a misogynist weirdo, here they hound Barack Obama over his reversal on FISA, here they own the Valerie Plame story in way that should shame regular journalists, and on and on.
Along the way Boehlert pens short, suspense novel-like, profiles of the people behind these various dustups. So we can see how the world looked to the guy who made the Hillary 1984 video, what motivated him and what he’s like in real life. These little profiles add context, but also make the various on-line sensations more human and relatable. It’s one thing to know that the woman who captured Obama’s famous “bitter” remarks was traveling on her own dime, it’s another to see it from her point of view, to try and understand how bewildering it was to suddenly become one of the most talked about people in the country.
Of course, “Bloggers on the Bus” can only chronicle some of the events of the blogs and the Great Blue Waves of ’06 and ’08. Tellingly, if you Google “Bloggers on the Bus” to find the book’s official website (which is surprisingly thin) the third link is to a Time article of the same title from February 2007. It was written in the middle of the minor on-line contretemps that broke out when the John Edwards campaign hired Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte to be their official blogger. Long story (very) short: Bill Donohue, a conservative Catholic notorious for clutching his pearls and fainting at even the mildest criticism of his beloved Church, raised a big stink about some things Marcotte had previously written. The whole thing ended a couple of days later when Marcotte and the Edwards campaign agreed to part ways. The Edwards campaign folded up about a year later (and thanks to Edwards’ fickle pickle never had a chance anyway), Marcotte continues her excellent blogging over at Pandagon and Donohue remains a narcissistic asshole.
None of this is mentioned in Boehlert’s book and that’s not so much a criticism as it is an unavoidable reality. Even though he limited his subject matter to popular lefty blogs and significant ways they interacted with the campaigns there is still far too much material for any book to wrap itself around. This denies the book a coherent narrative, but that’s not a flaw, it’s a reflection of the subject material. There is no one thing called the “blogosphere” or even “blogs”. However useful those terms are as shorthand, they are grotesquely inaccurate catchalls.
Crouse covered less than a bus full of people, Boehlert has to contend with thousands of bloggers and their legions of faceless commenters. He dedicates an entire chapter to the great Hillary vs Barack Blog War of 2008 but he’s assigned himself an impossible task. Boehlert knows his subject and writes a decent summary, but how can any summary of what was essentially a months long conversation between tens of thousands of people be anything but the most basic of outlines?
Not to be too glib, but in this case the medium isn’t the message so much as the message is the medium. Political blogging, in everything from loner sites like this one to great big communities like Daily Kos, arose in no small part because people felt ill served by what they were already reading and seeing. The mere existence of all these sites is a devastating critique the world Crouse described. The specifics, which Boehlert does such an excellent job of describing, almost don’t matter.
Which is not to say that “Bloggers on the Bus” isn’t worth reading. Quite the opposite, it’s a great primer for anyone who wants to try and understand the way the political conversation in this country is conducted. But even with its narrow focus it’s a hopelessly incomplete portrait that can never take its place along side “Boys on the Bus” due simply to the nature of its subject. It’s not so much a first draft of history as it is a snapshot, a portrait of a time on the internet that has already passed and will never come again (some of the touchstone pieces the book cites, like the video that publicized John Hagee’s Hitler sermon, are no longer available). It’s a neat book and an enjoyable read, but it can’t do anything more than show someone a little bit of how things work on-line. To get the full effect all you can do is open a browser and start clicking.
