Kevin Drum follows up on the anonymous briefing issue: “On the third hand, when bloggers start getting invested in this tradition, it gets harder to say just what the value of blogging is versus traditional journalism. More and more, though, that’s a distinction without a difference anyway, so maybe it doesn’t really matter.”
These days I think it basically is a distinction without a difference. That said, in addition to the specific issue about blogging as a medium there’s clearly a value in outsiders being able to do political commentary which is something the internet facilitated. I don’t think anything much would be accomplished by a given DC-based blogger (me, say) trying to totally exempt himself from the rigamarole of anonymous briefings and spin. But I think there’s a lot of value in the fact that guys like Kevin Drum and Glenn Greenwald who live outside the DC-NYC media/politics hub are able to offer commentary on current affairs from relatively high profile platforms. Thinking about my own personal work, I think it’s valuable to me that my model of doing blogging isn’t dependent on access and ability to get people to return my calls. At the same time, it’s also valuable that there are people out there with access doing interviews and getting people to return their calls. And it’s also valuable that there are people out there in Brazil and California able to lob opinion and analysis from far beyond the Beltway.
Readers deserve to be able to read a varied set of people working with a diverse set of models. Among other things, the existence of variety gives people an opportunity to test theories about capture and such. I think regular readers would agree that Kevin and I generally have pretty similar sellout wanker political opinions. But I’ve talked to Tim Geithner and he hasn’t—and I think the guy’s pretty funny and charming. Is this biasing my coverage, or does Kevin basically agree with me that TARP worked and the Obama administration is not the bad guy in terms of bank regulation?
from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/matthewyglesias/~3/h1HLZC0TS0A/outside-in.php
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