Barack Obama

The Power of Blogging

“…I came to understand that our cherished rights of liberty and equality depend on the active participation of an awakened electorate.” Barack Obama, Presidential Candidacy Announcement, Feb 10, 2007

The term “awakened electorate” stuck with me immediately upon hearing the announcement speech, so I went back and read the term in context to try to more fully understand what Barack meant by this term. He seems to be saying that our liberty, and our human rights can only be ensured by our ACTIVE participation in our government. He is saying that we control our own destiny, but only if we participate actively in shaping it.

I think the post by Paul Waldman, Cut the Smear Machine, on TomPaine.com, Feb 13, 2007, is an outstanding example of how bloggers (credible, thoughtful, non-biased, fact-based bloggers) are in the process of taking control of the media machine that is reporting rumors instead of facts in the interest of ratings, and holding them accountable for their reporting errors. Insisting on the public retraction of mis-information, and the publication of the correct information.

These are selected excerpts. Click on the link above to read the entire article.

Today a lie can get all the way around the world in the time it takes a liar to click a post. The good news is that the truth will be hot on its tail.

Consider the first of what will no doubt be many false stories spread about the Democratic candidates: the lie that Barack Obama attended a fundamentalist madrassa when he lived in Indonesia as a boy. When insightmag.com, a website owned by the right-wing Washington Times, put out a breathless report trumpeting the fantasy, Fox News immediately jumped on board, as did Limbaugh, Hannity…Why didn’t anybody ever mention, asked Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy, a man who makes Larry King look like Oscar Wilde, that that man right there was raised spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa? This sentence contained no fewer than five falsehoods: Obama wasn’t raised by his father, his father left the family when Obama was two years old, his father wasn’t a practicing Muslim, Obama wasn’t raised as a Muslim and he didn’t go to a madrassa ….

But then, perhaps spurred by their more or less constant feud with Fox, CNN sent a reporter out to get this checked to see if the story was true. ABC and the AP followed suit, and all reported to their audiences that what Obama had attended was nothing more than an ordinary public school. In other words, they did what journalists are supposed to do when confronted with a potentially scandalous story about a candidate: investigate before reporting it, then tell the public the facts. That those news organizations doing the right thing seems so remarkable is a testament to how debased American journalism has become.

After the madrassa story, it was rumored that Obama was now refusing to give interviews to Fox News in response to their appallingly irresponsible behavior. This kind of hardball is long overdue, not because Fox itself can be shamed into exercising some journalistic responsibility (shamelessness is one of the primary employment requirements at Fox) but because it sends a message to other journalists: We will hold you accountable for your actions. If you spread lies, we’ll treat you like a liar, and we don’t talk to liars.

(There are several paragraphs describing the Edwards’ blogger situation that preceed this paragraph)

…Despite there being some factual elements buried deep within the story, the two bloggers, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan, were, in fact, working for John Edwards, and they had previously written strong, even intemperate words criticizing the Catholic Church, this controversy was at its heart no different from the madrassa fiction. Both were attempts by right-wing operatives to create a scandal out of nothing in an attempt to damage a Democratic presidential candidate; in both cases these right-wing operatives sought to enlist the help of the media to do their dirty work.

And in both cases, the liberal blogs fought back (albeit for slightly different reasons; it wasn’t Edwards they were defending, but two of their own). They spread the facts, they put pressure on the media to report them accurately and they generally made the kind of ruckus the right wing has been much more effective at creating. In the end, Edwards did the right thing and refused to fire Marcotte and McEwan. Still, Donohue got the scalp he wanted: Marcotte quit the Edwards campaign this week. (You can read her explanation.)

The 2008 election will be a test of whether blogs have the power to enforce some standard of truth and shame on those news organizations that buy into made-up tales like the Obama madrassa story. During the 2004 campaign blogs were still a novelty, an emerging information source and organizing tool with mostly unrealized potential. Four years later they have become a major player, and journalists, terribly threatened though they may be by the idea that ordinary, uncredentialed people might be checking their work and calling them on their mistakes, have finally realized that blogs can’t be ignored. And if there’s one thing bloggers don’t hesitate to do, it is calling journalists to account when they have sinned.

© 2007 Life is an Ongoing Process.