It's not going to be a popular sentiment, but the blog phenomenon will either be completely ephemeral or the blogosphere will eventually be relegated to the fringes of modern politics. Why?
Well, it has to do with the entire reasons for their existence.
Columnists like Hugh Hewitt spend their hebdomadal six hundred words extolling the virtues of the blogosphere only to gleefully conclude that these "new journalists" will eventually take down the establishment.
Conservatives still get goosebumps when they visit the memory of blogs unearthing the jaw-dropping observation that the "National Guard" documents aired by Dan Rather looked like they came from Microsoft Word. It was a triumph over the big media outlets!
Liberals turn to blogs simply because only they give them the myopic and intellectually squinted view of the world that assuages their fears, strokes their golden locks, and tells them that George W. Bush wasn't legitimately elected in 2004, among other canards.
Conservatives get a passionate and reckless critic of the "liberal media" with confirmation that America is ready for a jihad against homos; liberals get a dream world where people care about their annual anti-war protests, believe that only a cryogenic freeze of the world's economy will save the Earth from melting down to a bubbling puddle of petroleum, and where "tax cuts" is a pejorative.
It's not journalism. The blogs didn't objectively analyze CBS's National Guard documents in the humanitarian interest of journalistic integrity. They were questioned by fervent Bush supporters who were unhappy with their Fearless Leader being impugned on national television.
On the other side, the conspirators casting accusations of democratic malfeasance in 2004 base their claims on nothing more than the vain hope that George W. Bush, like, ohmigod, couldn't have possibly been elected democratically after he killed millions of children, raped their mothers, crucified their fathers, and raided their life savings.
In an attempt to vindicate one's political view, one will get lucky and stumble across supportive facts - it's just the law of averages. However, these biased sycophants will never be more than laughable aspirants to the position of trusted news distilleries.
We may be disgusted by network news as we are disgusted by modern music. External trends can affect market changes in these sectors. The hippies and LSD inspired some of the greatest vicissitudes in music history, yet only the nescient myrmidons of Timothy Leary predicted LSD would overtake alcohol as the elixir of choice while communes would be the desired neighborhood for the next century.
The blogs are effective watchdogs over the media outlets in the same way that special interest groups often perform needed services for Congress. They are also popular in the same way that partisan commentary is popular.
Best case scenario, the blogs remain relevant as occasionally-read sources of information who desultorily strike gold in a lifetime of fruitless but impassioned claim jumping. This is not to say they won't remain popular - popularity and political relevance are distinct and often exclusive characteristics.
However, anathema to Mr. Hewitt, the blogs will never overtake objective media simply because they are not objective. They have no analytical power. They don't determine the context for data; they simply apply it for their own ends.
The same types of mission principles can be observed in the potboilers on the shelves of bookstores written by the punditry establishment. Anyone ever wonder how it's possible for both Ann Coulter and Al Franken to footnote nearly every sentence with a factual and respected citation in a book proving that the other is an evil, lying, manipulative spinmaster?
The authors can cite passage after passage, indictment after indictment, simply because their goal is to comb the annals of human history for justifications for their personal views. They don't react to events; they explain them away.
This is the same modus operandi that fuels the blogs. Reason dictates one responds to negative statistics by analysis of policy prescriptions. The establishment responds to them with excuses and contrasts explaining how, well, the other guy just does it so much worse than we do.
The technology factor will soon become irrelevant. Once establishment sources discover the allure of instant information, the accessibility advantage for blogs with disappear.
As I expect punditry will eventually turn away from the talentless and conflagrant talking heads who are now topping the New York Times bestseller lists and bloviating on cable news, I predict the convenience and aggressiveness of the blogosphere will be absorbed by objective media, eliminating the need for these biased "reporters."
The blogosphere will maintain the respect that talk radio currently commands. That is, they are popular, they are useful for specific purposes, but in the end, they are just rants.
The distinction between opinion and news is important to maintain, yet the blogosphere acts as if it never existed.
Op-ed columns fill newspapers, but their editorial stance does not single-handedly drive news reporting and coverage. This is the reality the blogs gainsay. However, for the sake of American media, we must not.
The above work is the opinion of the author,
and not necessarily that of the Prometheus Institute.
