Godzilla vs. the 'Blogosphere'

By GLENN HARLAN REYNOLDS
September 1, 2004; Page A12

With accredited bloggers at both conventions, this can fairly be called the first presidential election to be blogged. And that just might matter -- though if it does, it will be as much because of big-media vices as it is of bloggers' virtues.

The election coverage from Big Media has been unusually partisan this time around. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas famously remarked: "Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. . . . They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them . . . that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." When he made that remark, many were worried. If the big media all tilted toward one party (which was pretty clearly true) and if their influence was worth 15 points, enough to swing most any presidential election (which was plausible), then the institutional power of big media seemed to be a threat to democracy itself. But it hasn't worked out that way -- or if it has, John Kerry must be an awfully weak candidate to be neck-and-neck with President Bush despite a built-in 15-point advantage.

It's probably some of both. Mr. Kerry, as even many Dems are admitting, is a weak candidate. But the big media advantage doesn't seem to have turned out to be as big as some thought.

That has played hob with the Kerry campaign's strategy. It's been apparent for quite a while that Mr. Kerry's Vietnam record would be a centerpiece of his campaign, and it's also been apparent that he has stretched the truth more than a little where parts of it were concerned. In a Boston Herald piece inspired by "Apocalypse Now," Mr. Kerry wrote: "On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in 'Apocalypse Now,' took my patrol boat into Cambodia.

"In fact, I remember spending Christmas Day of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese Allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real." Mr. Kerry made similar claims on the Senate floor in 1986, adding that the memory was "seared -- seared -- in me." He also peddled variations on this story during press interviews over the years.

But the story isn't true. And the Kerry campaign eventually admitted that, but only after prodding from the media. Not from the newspapers and TV networks -- which studiously ignored the story for nearly two weeks -- but from blogs and talk radio. Bloggers researched the story on Google, on Factiva and Lexis, and in libraries. Talk-radio hosts, including some like Neal Boortz and Hugh Hewitt who are bloggers themselves, retailed the findings to the wider world. Eventually the Kerry campaign was forced to respond, which then forced the New York Times and the LA Times, grudgingly, to admit that the story existed and to start their own coverage.

As blogger Ed Driscoll noted, the Kerry media strategy was geared to the media environment of 1972, where the refusal to carry the story of a few big outlets chummy with the campaign would have been enough to keep things quiet. That didn't work, as the new media were enough to neutralize the media advantage that Kerry's strategy was built around. And that's quite a feat: Unlike the blogosphere's role in toppling Trent Lott, the Cambodia revelations happened not in the face of big media laziness, but in the face of active big-media opposition. (Even now, newspapermen like the Star Tribune's Jim Boyd are criticizing bloggers for covering the story, though without admitting that the bloggers had the facts on their side.)

Does this mean that blogs will work in the Bush campaign's favor? Not inevitably, and there are plenty of lefty blogs doing their best to beat Mr. Bush. But so long as the mainstream media are lazy, and biased -- and strongly in favor of a Democrat -- the fact-checking and media-bypassing power of the blogosphere is likely to disproportionately favor Republicans. That's not so much a reflection on blogs, alas, as it is a reflection on big media.

Mr. Reynolds, a professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, publishes the InstaPundit.com¹ weblog.