Eric S. Raymond on the MSM and the Falling Cost of Communications

Well, Eric is back with a vengeance with his essay MSM Loses its Power to Swing Elections . Interesting as always, here's some of the highlights:

There are many reasons besides Rathergate that Kerry is losing so badly. He's a pathetically weak candidate — a lousy stump speaker with no program and a nearly nonexistent legislative record, who ran on his Vietnam service only to have that prop knocked out from under him by former crewmates and superiors who accuse him of having been cowardly, opportunistic, and unfit for command. In fact, Kerry has no discernable political base of his own at all; his entire appeal comes from not being George W. Bush.

But Kerry's weaknesses, glaring though they are, are not the interesting part of the explanation. It's the MSM's inability to cover them up and make them a non-story that is really interesting. The attempt to present Kerry and Edwards as "dynamic", "optimistic" and "young" to which Evan Thomas admitted has mostly made them look vacillating, frivolous and jejune instead. CBS, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the other centers of the MSM had also been trying very hard to bury and discredit the Swift Vets; nevertheless, Unfit For Command is now the #1 nonfiction bestseller in the United States.

Nor were the MSM, despite a visible effort to do so, able to suppress the evidence that Dan Rather's anti-Bush memoranda had been forged. In fact, as I write they are proving unable to defend even the exculpatory fiction that Rather was an innocent dupe. The fact has come out that CBS was told in advance that two of the six documents it had were almost certainly bogus by its own examiners, and then witheld the other four from expert scrutiny and ran with the story anyway. The implications of that fact are being now dissected not just on partisan right-wing websites but out where the general public can see it.

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Before the Internet and cheap long-distance phone calls, pulling together a cooperative network large enough to produce and back Unfit For Command, or to perform forensic analysis on the Rather memos, would have been an extremely expensive and long-drawn-out operation. The market for ideas had a much longer clearing time then. In fact it is rather unlikely these sorts of organization would even have been attempted more than a decade ago — everybody's perception of the time and money cost would have been prohibitive.

Other forces are in play as well. One is that people are less willing than they used to be to derive their identities and a static set of political affiliations from the things about themselves that they can't change. Your family's politics is a far less important predictor of your vote than it was a generation ago (which, among other things, is why conservative talk of a "Roe effect", of liberal abortion supporters selecting themselves out of the population, sounds so much like wishful thinking). Union membership stopped being predictive sometime in Ronald Reagan's second term. Even traditional racial and ethnic interest blocs seem to be crumbling at the edges.

Increasingly, political power is flowing to consciously-formed interest groups that arise to respond to individual issues and survive (if they survive) as voluntary subcultures. The Swift Vets and MoveOn.org are highly visible examples of the trend. Internet hackers organizing against the DMCA and for open-source software is another. Indeed, the blogosphere as we know it is a voluntary subculture formed largely from the reaction to the trauma of 9/11.

To people in these subcultures, traditional party and ideological labels are less and less interesting. Case in point: Glenn Reynolds (aka InstaPundit), the pro-Iraq-war, pro-gay-marriage, anti-gun-control, pro-drug-legalization king of the bloggers. Is he a liberal Democrat with some conservative positions? A South Park Republican? A pragmatic libertarian? Not only do Glenn's own writings make it difficult to tell, he seems to determined to flirt with all these categories without committing to any of them. Other prominent bloggers, including those who broke Rathergate, exhibit a similar pattern. The MSM, looking through a left-wing prism, sees it as conservatism — but most bloggers despise the Religious Right and Buchananite paleoconservatism as heartily as they loathe Noam Chomsky.

Hear, hear! RTWT. And be sure to read the comments, such as this one from Allan Yackey

It is my belief that communications is what brought down the iron curtain. I see the blogs as a logical extension of the explosion of communications. Although I had heard of the blogs earlier. I only really discovered them as a result of John Kerry and Dan Rather. But I more than like what I see here. My own political positions leave me where it is difficult to identify me with a label. I have an example that I have been using recently. In a small town it is difficult for anyone to be a sucessful thief or to commit adultry. Everyone knows everyone else. Anything that an individual does or says is seen or heard by a member of the community who will communicate it to someone else, etc. As the world grew it became possible to do or say something in one place and something exactly different someplace else. You could do this with confidence that no one in location one would likely know or communicate with someone in location two. That condition no longer exists. What I have posted on one web site can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Whatever I have written anywhere, anytime is accessable to anyone anywhere. We are indeed in the "global village". As my grandmother used to say, "be certain that your sins will find you out"

The internet has a looooong memory, and Google is its retrieval device. Kerry has tried to say one thing in Poughkeepsie and another in Long Island, and been unable to get away with it, even with the MSM covering for him.

We are living in interesting times.