Here’s the full bib citation:

Boese, C. (2006) “Challenging the Power Structure.” Montana Journalism Review. Summer 2006, Number 35. pp. 8-10.

Challenging the Power Structure

 

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

By Christine Boese

Picture the prototypical American “town square,” the idealistic vision of Jeffersonian democracy: gathering places that people used to pass through almost every day, places that were the center of community life. Announcements and ideas were disseminated in these spaces. Anyone could set up a soapbox and start talking, although, as Clem Work has found in his research into the enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Act in Missoula in the early 20th century, there were very real attempts to squelch certain kinds of talk in some public squares.

Where do people gather to participate in their communities now? Aside from street festivals and parades, the few civic gatherings that remain take place in restricted or private spaces, in schools, churches, shopping malls, sports arenas. We have protections in the Constitution not only for speech, but also for the right to assemble. Activists of many stripes are bemoaning the loss of the true “commons,” spaces that are set aside as the public domain, shared spaces that belong to all.

Journalists often have an explicit goal to cover community activities, and as such, they monitor and report on what happens in the “commons.” But as the commons disappear, more often than not, journalists seek entry into the private spaces where decisions that affect communities are made. One unintended result of this shift is that journalists focus less on their communities and instead become willing satellites circling a class of power brokers, somewhat like the courtiers during Shakespeare’s time.

A journalist has an ethical obligation to go where people are exercising their right to assemble, to monitor and cover the community, even if that community is a “global village.” While face-to-face commons are disappearing, there still are places where people gather, discussing the events that affect their lives, participating in democracy in a most direct way.

And in the online “blogosphere,” people are gathering. They’re writing and editing their own customized interactive “newspapers” with headline readers and research they’ve done on their own, weighing and analyzing, making up their own minds instead of letting some editor they never voted for in the employ of some mass media conglomerate tell them what to think.

While the term “blog” was accepted into the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2004,1 few people profess to know very much about weblogs or the blog movement. If they do have an impression, it’s often of self-obsessed teenagers putting too much private information online, or of anonymous and irresponsible talk radio-style ranting of the far right and left.

The problem is that blog software and the blog movement are two very different things. Blog software is a tool that can be used for a wide range of purposes. The “blog movement” is a social phenomenon having a very real impact at this moment in history.

The vast majority of what’s being put online using blog software has very little to do with the “blog movement” per se. There are cooking recipe group blogs. About.com was converted to blog software several years ago. The University of Minnesota library is giving students blog space for learning, a project called UThink.2 Harvard Law School is using blogs to supplement teaching and discussions on legal issues.3 I have a poetry blog, my own idiosyncratic Norton Anthology, if you will.4

I often tell people that blog software is a poor person’s content management system. It’s like an empty coffee cup. What you pour into the cup is only bound by the limits of your imagination.

The database behind blog software is a terrific tool to hold all kinds of information for collaborative interactive access. I believe blog software will gobble up the entire Web because of the power of syndication (RSS) and headline feed readers.5

The “blog movement” is another thing altogether, and it’s having considerable impact on journalism and journalistic ethics.

What the blog movement really does is reclaim the public commons for something that could approximate participatory democracy. Bloggers are having an impact on politics in the United States, most prominently at the national level. Increasingly, with grassroots political organizing, a tool called “Meetups,”6 and citizen journalism, their impact is also beginning to be felt at state and local levels.

Why would journalists be leery of the blog movement? Perhaps its massive size 7 and cacophony of voices are off-putting. Unlike with the public square, interactive online spaces place no limits on the number of soapboxes, and interfaces make rude “interruptions” impossible. Headline feed readers assist in the sorting and editing process, and other evolving features online let readers know where the crowds are gathering in the commons, and what ideas are being discussed there.8 In that respect, the movement of crowds online resembles a political caucus, where participants vote with their feet.

A journalist wouldn’t expect every participant at a public hearing to be credible and quotable, but most often I hear journalists dismissing blogs because all bloggers aren’t credible or reliable sources. Why should they be? Would a journalist give prominence to and quote any person on the street, even the drunk that comes stumbling out of a bar?

This electronic commons is also a hybrid, because it’s a publishing space as well as a social space, and that gives a different kind of dialogic voice to the movement. While one person at a public hearing may have a nutty reason for opposing a particular change in the city law, that person didn’t used to have the power to publish that opinion and distribute it widely.

And that brings us to the most crucial issue between journalists and bloggers: power.

The folks who asked me to write this article probably expected me to discuss blogging codes of ethics like the excellent one found at cyberjournalist.net,9 or the “pledge” citizen journalists had to take at Dan Gillmor’s now failed “Bayosphere” project.10

Or perhaps they wanted me to discuss the common complaint made by bloggers against mainstream media, that traditional media methods are too cloaked in a black box and could be ethically suspect, so members of the blogging community often advocate for holding themselves to higher standards of ethical transparency than the mainstream press currently follows.

Those are all important issues because they deal with accountability and corruption, but the reason they are concerned with accountability and corruption is power. Power corrupts. If social and political power were not in play in the day-to-day workings of the mainstream press AND the blogosphere, none of this would be an issue. Until now, mainstream media has been a fairly exclusive gatekeeper to those who hold power.

Journalists approach power brokers in exclusive places on behalf of their readers/listeners/viewers. They must work with their feet in two worlds: the world of the power brokers, and the world of the ordinary people they serve. Corruption and serious ethical lapses in journalism usually happen when a power broker convinces a journalist to use the power of communication in service of the broker instead of the people. Journalists can be targets of such seductions just as surely as politicians can, because they sit at choke points of power, the power of the filter that says, “This gets published this way,” and “this doesn’t get published at all.” There are people who would like to influence that filter for their own benefit. A journalist may even see a way to personally benefit by influencing the filter.

And so long as the world determined and defined by that set of filters is the only game in town, that world rules.

But then along come the bloggers. The blog movement has risen up in open rebellion against the common practices of mainstream media in a self-appointed role as a check and balance against a non-elected, non-governmental entity that nonetheless wields great power. One major sector of the blogosphere devotes itself entirely to media criticism.

Why should bloggers have any power over huge media entities? Why should words disseminated over cyberspace, the words of millions of bloggers, amount to anything except a rising chorus of babble? If ethics are about how one uses power responsibly according to a set of values based on something other than personal gain, would bloggers need ethics if they had no real power?

A peculiar thing is happening to ordinary people in the United States. They may be participating in the public commons in cyberspace on their own time, but their employers are becoming interested in monitoring what they have to say. Unlike when you speak words into the air, words uttered in cyberspace live forever in the ethers, in Google’s long memory. And some people who have signed their names to their words online are losing their jobs over what they have written.

Generally, one would assume the First Amendment right to free speech and freedom to assemble would cover a person in such instances. However, employers who would restrict or monitor employee speech acts in cyberspace could seemingly respond, “Why of course you have freedom of speech. You are free to speak all you want, just as you also are free to not work here.”

Bloggers, dissenting radio stations with significant audiences but few advertisers, and divergent voices can be seen as a threat by powerful people who are willing to use their power to restrict such voices. Perhaps that’s because, as the writers of the U.S. Constitution understood, speech itself is powerful, simply the power of a voice speaking its truth. The kings and lords of our world amass power and wealth at levels that are hard to imagine, yet it appears some of them tremble in the face of free and dissenting speech.

What, then, is the most ethical act a person can engage in right now? What would that radical pamphleteer Thomas Paine have done? Many journalists decry the fact that a number of bloggers are not using their real names and instead adopt pseudonyms on their sites. This, they say, is a lapse in ethics and it undermines the credibility of these sites.

Bloggers, on the other hand, have to find a way to keep a steady paycheck while speaking their truths to power. Free speech uttered while warming one’s hands over a barrel fire under a bridge has very little communicative reach. Anonymity may breed irresponsibility and possibly risk libel, but which ethical value is higher, getting the story out, or putting it away to never see the light of day because the price of putting your name on it is too high?

Think of what our world would be like if the words of many pseudonymous writers in our past had never reached us, including that war correspondent and socialist Eric Blair, an advocate for clear and concrete writing and against the political use of language to deliberately lie and obfuscate. He did that all the while lying about his own identity and hiding behind the fake name of George Orwell.

Endnotes

1 “‘Blog’ Is Runaway Word Of Year.” Associated Press story at CBS News Dec.1 2004. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/01/print/main658433.shtml.

2 “Uthink: Blogs at the University Libraries.” University of Minnesota Libraries. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/.

3 “Weblogs at Harvard Law.” Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/.

4 Boese, C. Ed. (2006) “Headpiece Filled with Straw.” Retrieved 3/12/06 at http://www.serendipit-e.com/hollow.

5 I recommend starting at Bloglines.com or FeedDemon.com to try out some of the most user-friendly headline feed readers.

6 Meetup: World’s largest community of local Meetups, clubs, and groups!” Retrieved 3/14/06 at http://www.meetup.com.

7 At last count, Technorati.com says it is monitoring 30.5 million blogs (3/14/06).

8 Technorati.com is one of the most popular tools for finding out where the action is in the blogosphere on any given day. Other suitable sites are the Daypop Top 40 at Daypop.com and Blogpulse.com.

9 “A Blogger’s Code of Ethics.” Cyberjournalist.net. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php.

10 “Bayosphere Citizen Journalist Pledge.” Bayosphere. Retrieved 3/11/06 at http://bayosphere.com/cjregister.

By Christine Boese

The book you have before you is a hybrid document. It was born in a particular time and place in the context of the build-up to the United States’ war against Iraq, but it also found its voice on the Internet in a very specific kind of dialogue. Carolina Podesta has fashioned this book from its online context, but many other voices were speaking with her on the site through its interactive comments feature. Those voices gave her feedback, support, discussion, and fed her thoughts, often from a great distance as she worked in Erbil, Kurdistan, in northern Iraq and then on to Baghdad during the war. Those voices fed her future words and thus are part of this book, part of the hybrid from online text to printed text.

Very few books start out as a multi-voiced dialogue and then shape into a singular text. Usually the path of a book starts with a lone author with an idea or story she wants to share, and from the text of the book, it becomes part of a larger conversation and dialogue. The path of this book begins in dialogue, shapes into a printed text, and then opens up into space for dialogue once again, as part of a new, larger conversation.

Here I will tell how I became part of this story, a midwife of sorts, from another country that might be the United States, or it really might be the virtual nation that is the Internet, cyberspace. There is much about this story I can’t know because I did not live in Argentina, the site of the largest audience for the web site “OJO” at http://www.serendipit-e.com/ojo (although statistics did show a significant number of readers from Mexican domain names). I had to read the site using the poor filter of a Google machine translation because I am dyslexic and have never learned Spanish. I’m sure there are nuances and meanings I missed that were lost in the translation.

Even with the rough translation, I could tell something significant was happening on the “OJO” site. Carolina and I had never met in person, yet I saw that her “eye” could see in ways that, as a journalist covering the war at CNN Headline News, where I worked, was not the same “eye” that I was conditioned to expect. Carolina had a broader perspective and the vision of a poet.

I wish I did understand better the impact the contribution of the weblog “OJO” had on Argentineans. All I can assess are the site statistics and the highly interactive responses posted by readers. I wish I knew what it was like to be reading updates in Argentina. Perhaps after this book comes out I will visit and have a chance to learn more.

“OJO” appeared on the Internet at a very auspicious time in terms of the dominant Western, corporate-owned media. These giant media entities (including my employer, Time Warner) didn’t see the tiny challenge appearing in the form of weblogs, or perhaps they did but were at a loss as to how to respond. I refer to the rise of journalistically-focused, often highly personal, first person weblogs, or “blogs.”

Blogs are what I do. I am a student of the blogging movement, a builder and a keeper of weblogs.

Some of you may be asking, “What is a blog?” Perhaps you have never gone online, or have never seen a weblog on the World Wide Web. Or you may have seen a blog and not known that is what it was.

In its most simple form, a weblog is a piece of software that makes it very easy for a non-technical person, or even a traveler away from his or her computer, to post regularly updates to a web site in a journal or in diary-like fashion. Many blogs are oriented to a calendar or specific dates when updates were made. In the case of “OJO,’ you could click on a date on the calendar and read what Carolina Podesta had to say on that date during the Iraq war.

The web site, http://www.serendipit-e.com/ojo, had other features as well, such as topical categories, a site search engine, an automatic table of contents, and most important, a “Comments” link at the end of each post, a bulletin board for readers to join in and continue the conversation.

All of this is made possible by an unobtrusive little database running behind the scenes created by a weblog tool called “Movable Type.” Anyone could create such a site once the software is correctly installed with a domain name and an account that supports PHP and possibly MySQL, which are both free and open source. A “Movable Type” blog can be set for quite a few different languages as well.

But there is more to blogging than a piece of software that lets you post to a web site from your laptop or a cybercafe or even text messaging from your mobile phone. Blogging also has become a significant social and political movement, experiencing rapid growth in the US but also catching on worldwide. Blogging has the potential to harness the power of the printing press more so than ordinary web pages.

This is because fans of a particular blog can subscribe to its “headline feed” for free using news feed reader software (usually free also)[1] or an email subscription. Then they will be automatically notified when the blog is updated. This puts the big newspaper headline services and the little blogs on somewhat equal footing. It also makes it easier for search engines to find and index blogs.

In the United States large numbers of ordinary people are keeping blogs. Part of the reason is the worldwide attention on blogs during the Iraq war. Blogs like “OJO” that were focused on the war put the blogging phenomenon on the map. It attracted a lot of readers and international media coverage, especially for “Salam Pax,” the so-called “Baghdad Blogger” (now also a columnist for the UK Guardian).[2]

Because I make a study of online social movements, I’ve been watching the rise of blogs through several key events leading up to the Iraq war. After observing these events, I was enthusiastic about building and sponsoring Carolina Podesta’s blog. I do live in the US, and can’t help seeing these events from a US perspective, although the impact of at least 2 of these events was felt globally. I was also quite certain blogs would have a global impact very soon, which made the “OJO” blog a perfect test case to approach audiences outside the US.

Weblog technology has been around since the late 1990s. Initially blogs weren’t very popular except among teenagers writing to and for other teenagers. The other people who used blogs in the beginning were techies: web designers, computer programmers, and engineers, using the software to document their projects. Due to the dot.com boom of the late 1990s, there were a lot of techie bloggers living in New York City on September 11, 2001 when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. While the world was in shock, people in and around New York City were trying to find loved ones, to communicate and make meaning, and record their experiences during that life-changing event.

People made memorials, volunteered for the Red Cross, and those techies with blogs started recording stories on their blogs, gripping personal stories.

Most folks still got their primary news from all the usual channels. Blogs were still flying primarily under the radar, told about by word-of-mouth. Those who did discover the grassroots reporting found the emotions more raw and opinionated, less pre-digested and branded than mass media coverage in the US tends to be.

This was a significant shift. The bloggers felt the power and impact of what they could do and they started taking themselves more seriously. Many others also felt the impact of the 9/11 blogs and were motivated to start their own blogs as well. Quite a few of these people, the second wave, were professional working journalists. They felt a power and a service in blogging, which hit touchstones of things that had drawn them to the field of journalism in the first place.  Some had issues to work out with their employers about whether the blogs were part of their official duties or independent. Could they say anything at all on their blogs? Some did and got fired, like Steve Olafson of the “Houston Chronicle.”[3]

Blogging was still too new and Afghanistan was too remote for blog coverage to be a factor in the Afghan war after 9/11. The next significant event in the blog movement leading up to the Iraq war is the most US-specific, but it illustrates the nascent and growing social force of blogs translating into political power. While this event only affected the US, bloggers worldwide should sit up and take notice. There is an object lesson here.

In the US the position of Senate Majority Leader is a quite powerful gatekeeper in the government. The Senate is the most prestigious lawmaking body and the Majority Leader makes committee appointments, can stall or make laws disappear, and can even challenge the US president with various tactics. In December 5, 2002, this position was held by a man who knew how to use the power of his position, a Republican from Mississippi, Senator Trent Lott.

At a birthday party for the 100-year-old South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, Sen. Lott got up to make a speech. Perhaps to flatter the elderly gentleman, Sen. Lott, also from the South, made a statement that the US would be better off if Sen. Thurmond had been elected president when he ran in 1948. While a seemingly nice thing to say, at the time Sen. Thurmond was running for president he held a position that supported the segregation of whites and African Americans, an oppressive and racist policy that people in the 1960s civil rights movement, like Martin Luther King Jr., successfully fought against.

In the years since the civil rights movement, no politician could advocate such views and get elected, so old segregationists like Sen. Thurmond publicly recanted their past racist views. But for Sen. Lott to say the world would be better off if Sen. Thurmond had become president in 1948 seemed like he was saying the world would be better off with racial segregation.

The US mainstream media barely covered the birthday party speech. The next day a few prominent Democrats, including former Vice President Al Gore, condemned the statement. Other Senate Democrats forgave Sen. Trent Lott easily. By the third day the story was dead in big media outlets.

Bloggers did not forgive such a statement so easily.[4] The political blogs in the US sank their teeth into the story and would not let go. They were doing research, ranting and raving, throwing their words into the blog echo chamber (many blogs also constantly link to each other, giving stories a longer news cycle) until the story reached escape velocity. A week later the mainstream media was forced to report on the blog furor and also to give more coverage to the original story. Two weeks later Sen. Trent Lott was in the center of a growing grassroots political firestorm that had bypassed the traditional media. Many claim Sen. Lott was eventually forced to resign his powerful position in the Senate on Dec 20, 2002 primarily due to the pressure by bloggers.[5]

The third event that significantly advanced the blog movement was the crash of the Space Shuttle Columbia over a large section of Texas in February 2003.  This was a global news event with a broad local impact: large numbers of Texans had debris falling onto their property, some of it quite dangerous and toxic.

Blogging works best when it harnesses grassroots power in posting or in the linked “Comments” board: the first-person observations or the voices of ordinary people. One Texas newspaper realized that fact and put up a blog on its web site devoted specifically to the shuttle crash and found debris. It opened the site to direct posting by readers as they became reporters telling their stories. They were also encouraged to post digital pictures of debris on their property and assist with the investigation.

For a time, that newspaper’s blogspace was getting more web traffic than the paper’s official reporting. This shift speaks volumes about what sort of coverage people were hungry for and what may be lacking in traditional journalism.

This was the atmosphere in the blog universe online as the rumbling began that the US would soon go to war with Iraq, with or without the backing of the UN. Among journalists who remembered the 1991 Gulf war, there was concern about how this new war would be covered. In 1991 reporters got very little access on the ground and became highly dependent on daily briefings and analysis by retired generals. We didn’t know if this war would be any different. We had just heard at CNN about the proposed embedding process, but had no way of predicting whether or not it would lead to improved war coverage.

Through a friend I met Carolina Podesta and another journalist in Kurdistan. I immediately offered to build and host blogs for them.

My first thought was selfish. I wanted to be sure there were independent, non-embedded voices reporting on this war. I wanted to build their blogs because I wanted to read their blogs. I was hungry for that blog-style of first person observation. I wanted to know I had a source on the ground in Iraq that could take me past the official version of events.

Then, as I thought about it more, I realized other bloggers were probably getting ready to do the same thing, and that a vital body of Iraq warblogs could have a real impact on the way this war was covered. I had a sense that this war, unlike the remote Afghan war, could be a way in which journalistic blogs could have their moment in the sun, and that we may well be doing something historic. In the end, I believe that turned out to be the case.

The embedding process did keep mainstream coverage of the war from being so driven by briefings and the official, public relations-spin version of events, but globally, there was widespread suspicion that “embedded” meant “in bed” with the soldier’s units and the official point of view. This drove many readers to warblogs. As warblogs gained popularity and traffic as the war progressed, traditional media found itself covering “the warblog story.”

What was interesting about those prominent warblogs was that their writers were largely armchair reporters or “news aggregators.” These bloggers read news coverage of the war avidly and critically and linked to key pieces of information they were researching. They also openly advocated particular positions or points of view across the entire political spectrum. Yet these sites contained little to no original reporting.

As the war went on, however, attention began to shift to blogs written by people who were actually “on the ground” in Iraq, like Carolina Podesta or Joshua Kucera, or the “Baghdad Blogger.” These writers gave first-hand accounts of what the war was like for ordinary people, using specific detail often overlooked, homey little details like the cost of bread, difficulties of travel, people evacuating.

Another interesting story began to be reported at this time in the European press. Non-US news services were reporting an increase in web site traffic from US domains. Many of the “news aggregator” warblogs were ranging outside US media and putting links on their sites to overseas sources, especially the UK “Observer” and the “Independent.” The BBC was even hosting warblogs for its correspondents on the BBC site. CNN did ask one of its Iraq reporters, Kevin Sites, to stop posting to his blog.[6] Time magazine, also part of the corporate entity Time Warner along with CNN, asked Joshua Kucera shortly before the battle of Baghdad to stop posting to the blog I built for him, despite having originally given permission. Among the mainstream media outlets, there were considerable differences in policy on how to handle the blogging phenomenon. Were these blogs a “threat” to traditional media reporting? Or were they something to be embraced by the traditional media?

In the end, Carolina Podesta’s blog was a great success in ways I could not have anticipated. She brought a Spanish language blog into this historic moment when world media coverage of the Iraq war was crucial due to limitations of perspective within the US mainstream media by the highly polarized and fear-driven political climate created by 9/11. Many warbloggers outside of the US performed this amazing service.

Carolina’s blog was also a success because of its transcendent nature. Carolina sought perspective and looked to literature, looked to the world of ideas, tried to put uncertain events in a larger context. The many readers who commented on “OJO” often responded to this. It was personal. Carolina and I had never met face-to-face, but when things got scary in Iraq, I felt the personal connection so strongly I sat and worried about her, was she safe? Did she get back from Mosul OK? Joshua Kucera, another blogger and reporter in Kurdistan, wrote to me that in 4 years of reporting for the US media from overseas, he had gotten more feedback on his work from his blog in the first two weeks of the war than in the previous 4 years combined. Readers get involved with blogs. They start to care.

Carolina also brought something extra to her “eye:” a good dose of heart. That also comes through even in Google machine translation. The people of Argentina are lucky to have her. I am proud to have been a midwife to this blog, and Carolina’s “eye” will always have a place on my site, serendipit-e.com. Serendipity means learning on a journey through accidental discovery. This is one of the best accidental discoveries I’ve ever made.

[1] For Windows users, one such free news feed reader can be downloaded at http://www.feedreader.com. There are many others as well. For Mac users, Net News Wire Lite is the most popular, and can be found at http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/.

[2] “UK Paper Recruits Iraqi Blogger.” Associated Press. May 30, 2003. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,59057,00.html

[3] “Houston Chronicle writer gets canned for running a Web site.” Richard Connelly. Houston Press. August 8, 2002. http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2002-08-08/hostage.html/1/index.html.

[4] “Bloggers catch what Washington Post missed.” Oliver Burkeman. The Guardian. December 21, 2002. http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,864036,00.html.

[5] In the current US presidential election campaign, Democratic candidates are still capitalizing on the momentum of political blogs. Many candidates and their supporters are keeping campaign and fund-raising blogs. Howard Dean is leading the field in fund-raising among Democrats, with $15 million largely raised in small contributions from the Internet and through his official campaign blog.

[6] I should note that my blog-building has nothing to do with my job at CNN Headline News. I do blog research and development on my own time. My views here are my own and do not represent the views of CNN or its parent company, Time Warner.