Rather than take up comment space on Hugh Holub’s excellent post, I’m going to offer my two cents here.

First, an observation about anonymity. Here I agree with Brodesky; it’s a curse. It is especially objectionable in comment threads, where people are able to get away with comments that they would be ashamed of if properly identified.

For all of the supposed anonymous blogging that Brodesky complains of he seems to know quite a bit about who’s blogging where. Here at TC.com most of our bloggers actually sign their blogs and the identity of those who don’t is pretty much an open secret.

One of Brodesky’s major criticisms of the blogosphere is that bloggers don’t do what responsible reporters do: get both sides of the story. Getting “both sides of the story” is what makes real reporters reliable and unbiased.

Maybe so, but it frequently leads to a failed obligation to get at the truth.

Here’s an example:

Too much political reportage takes the form of reporting candidate Jones’s assertion that Social Security is broke and candidate Smith’s claim that Social Security is funded until  the end of time. Is this enough? No. If this is your story you have failed the reader. You haven’t made any attempt to determine which one is right; or if the debate is grounded in contradictory assumptions such that the candidate exchange is simply empty.

Your story my be ‘unbiased’ but it’s less than useful. You have simply reported two opposed biases: Mr. Jones’s truthiness and Mr. Smith’s truthiness. Wow.

Art Jacobson

I’ve taken some time off to consider what lessons, if any, we can draw from the primaries.

One lesson surely is that negative advertising works. For the next nine weeks we may expect more of the same. Much of it will be paid for by corporation-financed organizations parading themselves as non-partisan public interest groups. Grass roots of Astroturf.

Mailers and persistent TV ads were certainly effective. The Democratic Party spent a lot of money to get Kelly elected in CD8. Their anti-Paton thrusts took the form of expensive mailers. The same was true of McCain’s incredibly expensive attack campaign against Hayworth.

(I’m not in a position to comment about TV ads, since here at The Data Port we watch about three hours of TV a week. Pretty clearly the decline of reasoned political discussion was matched by a swelling of the purses of radio and television operations…the  folks who profited nicely from the decline of rational political debate.)

The big question in my mind is about the role of political blogs in affecting an election. What exactly do they do? They are not a source of information for the general public. The general public simply doesn’t read them; the general public gets most of its political info in sound-bite servings on TV.

Blogs are certainly not going to change the minds of folks in “the other party” because those folks don’t read “my party” blogs.

My judgement is that the blogs are read by the already convinced and committed, who are the choirs to whom the bloggers preach. At their most effective they provide talking points that members of the choir could take out into the real (as opposed to the virtual) world.

So what do you think?

Do Political Blogs Affect Elections?