Blogs in the MSM: Rating the roundups

January 24, 2006 By 2 Comments

Traditional news sources are telling a contradictory story about political weblogs. While blogs are presented as the engines of a rejuvenated political debate, MSM sources often link readers to posts that merely restate ideas that have been repeatedly rehearsed by politicians, activists and mainstream commentators.

Most Internet users have yet to start using blogs — about 73 percent of them, according to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project — and it is reasonable to predict that some will try to learn about blogs through major news sources’ blog roundups. In the absence of a clear consensus on the purpose and merit of blogs, readers who are new to blogs may misjudge the roundups as measures of public opinion. To help readers access new and informed ideas in political debates, MSM sources may have to betray the democratizing potential of blogs and take the risk of judging individual bloggers on their expertise and originality.

The traditional media kept a watchful eye on political blogs during Judge Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings this month. Washingtonpost.com‘s “Who’s Blogging?” feature tracked bloggers who linked to Post stories, as the site has done since fall 2005. NYtimes.com ran one of its sporadic blog roundups for the occasion. And Slate shifted the focus of its regular “Today’s Blogs” column to the confirmation hearings.

The roundups delivered a heavy helping of stridently partisan blogs and threw in some nonpartisan legal blogs like SCOTUSBlog, but only a few moderate voices like Donklephant were included. The roundups make American political debate look more stagnant, confusing and hopelessly narrow than it really is. How can a first-time blog reader tell the difference between bloggers trying to evolve new ideas and those trying to vindicate their preconceptions? Should he or she rely on the in-house bloggers of publications and political groups or the freestanding, unaffiliated citizens who supposedly define the medium? If roundups answer these questions more often, they will offer a powerful vehicle for introducing readers to blogs that offer more than simplistic partisanship.

A disconnected debate

It’s true that the decisive lure of most popular political blogs is that they tell their readers what they want to hear and tend to acknowledge opposing ideas only to deride them. Pete Welsch found empirical evidence of this tendency last year during his research as a graduate student at Indiana University. Welsch first analyzed two conservative blogs, Instapundit and Outspoken, and two progressive blogs, Eschaton and Mouse Musings. He found that they rarely linked to the same sites — or to sites that advocated the opposite political ideology. As he researched a wider sample, he did find liberal blogs linking to conservative ones and vice versa, but, Welsch says, “A lot of that is going to be one side liking to the other and saying, ‘Look at this garbage.’”

Political bloggers represent themselves and their like-minded readers. Editors of online blog roundups say they don’t want to make their readers think otherwise. They just want to keep bloggers from stealing traffic and give readers access to a broader debate. But the latter can only work if MSM roundups lead readers to bloggers who think independently and draw on relevant experience and knowledge.

It is difficult to guide readers to a balanced list of blogs efficiently and maintain quality control at the same time, admits Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com. “The Post generates between 100-200 articles a day, and to have someone continually cruising the blogosphere to keep on top of things just isn’t a good use of staff time,” he said in an e-mail interview. The Post’s “Who’s Blogging?” uses Technorati, a blog search engine, to gather links to blog posts that link back to Post stories. All a blogger has to do to get linked is register with Technorati and include a link to a given Post story. This usually yields a list that mixes insightful blogs in with boring ones. Many of the latter simply quote several paragraphs from stories and add a paragraph of their own comments, which are often predictably party-line.

“Sure, sometimes the blog posts don’t add much to the story, but we’re willing to accept that reality in exchange for being open to debate,” Brady says. “We can’t be accused of picking and choosing.”

Technorati also allows browsers to sort results by “authority” — the most-linked-to blogs being the most authoritative. This at least rewards the blogs that readers (or other bloggers) consider most reliable, but it doesn’t take into account other factors that constitute authority, like education, professional experience and demonstrated expertise.

Those qualities would help, for example, when scanning comments on blogs linked to “Pushing the Limits of Wartime Powers,” a news analysis that ran in the Post on Sunday, Dec. 18. Roughly paraphrased, the liberal blog comments one stumbles across range from “President Bush thinks he is on a mission from God” to “President Bush is kind of like Big Brother” to “I hope President Bush gets impeached.” Of course, the Post linked to conservative blogs as well, but the liberal links just demonstrate the lack of originality and variety among blogs within either category. At this point, more than a month later, there are many more posts linked to the story, and much more variety, but who’s checking this late (except perhaps extremely dedicated blog readers)?

Nitpicking the blogosphere

While it is not impossible for a strictly partisan blog to provide insight, specialized blogs like SCOTUSblog consistently offer something more useful than the party line — running expert commentary that would not fit into the typical consumer newspaper story. Such blogs certainly exist to help legal experts talk with each other, but there’s no reason that the average reader can’t use them to supplement traditional media stories with technical and historical detail.

Slate‘s daily blog roundup, “Today’s Blogs,” seems most effective at guiding readers to those supplements — and it provides a model for other roundups. Writers hand-pick links on a few selected issues each day, and also provide background information, if available, about those bloggers. This guides new blog readers through a muddle of pseudonyms, anonymity and conjecture to bloggers who just might know what they’re talking about. It’s also crucial to serving a Web-only magazine’s audience, which tends to know more about blogs. “You have to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff,” says “Today’s Blogs” editor Rachael Larimore. “We want people to know that they can come to us and find out what an authoritative blogger is saying.”

Larimore says this makes Slate more friendly to readers who aren’t used to blogs. “We don’t like to assume that our readers are familiar with everyone,” she said.

The New York Times can be picky as well, having offered blog roundups only sporadically. Two recent roundups accompanied stories that involved criticism of The Times itself — the jailing and testimony of Times reporter Judith Miller in October and The Times’ revelation last month that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to perform wiretaps without obtaining warrants. Whoever organized the Miller-related roundup seems to have paid attention to bloggers’ qualifications, judging by the first three blogs linked to: Talking Points Memo by Washington Monthly writer Joshua Micah Marshall; First Draft by Tim Porter, whose resume includes 16 years as an editor at the San Francisco Examiner; and DavidCorn.com by David Corn, author of “The Lies of George W. Bush.” Corn and Marshall have their politics tattooed on their virtual faces, but they accompany their ideological assertions with observation and informed analysis.

The Times’ most recent roundup, as of this writing, accompanied its coverage of the Alito hearings. The linked blogs again appear to be hand-picked; many do not even link to Times coverage. This approach seemed to reveal the most variety, especially on the third night of the hearings. The Times roundup included posts on a variety of issues ranging from abortion to the small legal and procedural technicalities of the hearings. But to get the same variety on Washingtonpost.com, readers had to skim through each separate Post story on the hearings. A Post story that focused on questions about Alito’s views on abortion, for example, linked only to posts that discussed that specific story and emphasized abortion.

Sure, Slate and The Times can be accused of picking and choosing, but that doesn’t preclude variety or openness. On the contrary, a well-maintained blog roundup seems to give readers access to a wider political spectrum. And, because blogs are so easily accessible, a well-focused roundup might help publications encourage their readers’ curiosity. Few readers will put down the newspaper to look for the latest number of Harvard Law Review, but they might be willing to click away to a blog like SCOTUSblog for a few minutes of helpful elaboration.

Larimore says she and other Slate writers keep their own lists of blogs to check regularly, supplemented by Technorati searches and Google blog searches. The disadvantage of manual roundups is that they require more time and resources — and so can only be included with a few stories. In that sense, the hand-picked roundups won’t be as valuable to readers who want to explore the broadest possible range of opinions on the broadest possible range of news. Automated roundups may still be useful to readers when MSM sources are unable to offer hand-picked roundups.

Rallying the troops, ignoring the moderates

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos and Kathryn Jean Lopez of The National Review’s The Corner blog agree on at least one thing: They represent only themselves and perhaps some of their readers.

“‘General public’ people probably aren’t watching the [Alito] hearings at all, because even some of our political-minded types have been dozing off,” Lopez said in an e-mail as she blogged on the hearings. She added: “People often tell me they come to us on National Review Online to find out ‘what conservatives are thinking.’ Sometimes, that proves more difficult — and interesting — than they thought, because even us conservatives — even those sitting around the same editorial table (real or cyber) — are not monolith on a whole host of issues.”

But Moulitsas says: “Every blog focuses on particular subject matter and hence attracts a like-minded audience. That’s all you’d ever be able to measure.”

By linking to these partisan voices (even if they are more complicated than expected, as Lopez suggests), political blog roundups tend to exaggerate the perception that American voters are firmly divided along party lines. Roundups acknowledge non-partisan and moderate blogs, but not as often as they link to stridently partisan blogs. Justin Gardner, leader of the ideologically mixed group blog Donklephant, thinks Americans are more often centrist than party-line, and he hopes blogs and blog roundups will eventually reflect that. “I like the position that we’re in,” he says of Donklephant. “We don’t have to rally the troops sometimes when we know that the poll numbers aren’t what we would want.”

CNN Internet Reporter Jacki Shechner, who primarily talks about stalwart right- and left-wing blogs during her short blog segments on “The Situation Room,” said centrist bloggers don’t get enough coverage. “I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t start including them some more,” she said.

New connections

Though they too often show new blog readers a narrow spectrum of ideas, roundups might reinforce the role of traditional news outlets while improving the debate for those already immersed in blogs.

Technorati CEO David Sifry hopes roundups will at least help bloggers and established journalists share traffic and ideas. “This is actually a synergistic relationship and not a parasitic relationship,” Sifry said.

As third-party monitors, mainstream news sources can also increase communication among bloggers who wall themselves off with RSS feeds and one-sided blogrolls. Laer Pearce of the conservative Cheat-Seeking Missiles, who was linked in a Times roundup, says he’ll pay more attention to such features in the future, if only to explore the blog world outside of his own ideological circle.

Roundups can enrich debate by encouraging both new blog readers and bloggers themselves to digest conflicting and nuanced opinions. “I’m more apt to add blogs I like to [my RSS feed] than ones that I don’t,” e-mails Pearce. “That’s a mistake, because intellectual honesty, not to mention fresh ideas, depends on exposing yourself to a broad diversity of views.” This all seems obvious, but it’s a good reminder that even a medium with the potential to open debate can give people tunnel vision.

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Online forums, bloggers become vital media outlets in Bahrain

May 17, 2005 By 1 Comment

It doesn’t take much to get Mahmood Al-Yousif’s juices flowing, to get him steamed at the latest moves by the Ministry of Information (MoI) in Bahrain. Al-Yousif, 43, is the first prominent blogger in the tiny archipelago in the Persian Gulf and runs a technology company there called Computer Point. After the MoI announced it wanted all Web sites and blogs to register with the government, Al-Yousif didn’t hold back.

“They think that they are putting in more controls,” he told me. “More important to them is keeping tabs on thoughts. The Ministry of Information’s main purview is making sure … they are there as a censorship office for the local papers as well as international papers. They are there as spin doctors for any article that comes up for or against the Bahraini government. Rather than being a facilitator for creativity, they are the creativity graveyard.”

Al-Yousif sent me an e-mail with his thoughts on how upset he was with the registration drive and how he would never register. Then he posted those thoughts to his blog, Mahmood’s Den, which acts as more of a news and conversation hub. And most prominently, he displayed Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the top of his blog as the reason he is not registering with the government — along with a Creative Commons license, with the tagline, “I don’t need the MoI’s protection, thanks very much!”

Bahrain finds itself in the stutter-start of democratic reform, a longtime emirate which shifted gears in 1999 when Sheikh Isa died and a more liberal prince, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, took over. Political prisoners were freed, and a new constitution allowed for elections to a lower house of parliament in 2002, but the new king retained power to appoint an upper house of parliament, the prime minister and cabinet and all the judges.

The country’s population is about 700,000 total, with a literacy rate of almost 90%, more than half owning cell phones and nearly 200,000 Internet users in 2003, according to the CIA Factbook on Bahrain. As in Iraq’s history, Bahrain has a majority of Shi’ite Muslims but is ruled by Sunni Muslims.

While the U.S. considers Bahrain to be an important ally, with the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet based there as a jumping off point during the second Iraq War, Bahrain has backslid on its program of reforms, especially with regards to the Internet. There are laws restricting freedom of press, the MoI has given all Web sites six months to register with the government, and three proprietors of the popular Bahrainonline.org forum were arrested in February.

While blogger Juan Cole complained that the American media hasn’t been paying much attention to Bahrain — including protests by Shi’ites for constitutional reform — the Wall Street Journal recently fronted a deep report on problems in Bahrain titled, “After High Hopes, Democracy Project in Bahrain Falters.”

Trouble in paradise

While the kingdom has seen a surge of tourism from other Arab countries since its liberalization, the recent bad publicity from the registration drive and the Bahrainonline arrests show that reform isn’t easy.

Dr. Nasser Qaedi is a media attaché in the Foreign Press Affairs office at Bahrain’s Ministry of Information. He denied that there was a trend toward curtailing freedom of expression online and said that the two incidents were not related and come from different parts of the government.

“This [Bahrainonline] case has nothing to do with the Ministry of Information,” Qaedi told me. “The Ministry of Justice is in charge of that, and we don’t know the update of the case. We felt that the registration procedure following the Bahrainonline case presented the image that it’s related somehow, but it’s not. When things like the Bahrainonline case happen, it’s not necessarily a reflection of where the kingdom is headed. It doesn’t mean there’s a trend or anything like that. We’re still pushing ahead, we’re currently in the process of labor reform and extending more labor rights.”

When the Bahrainonline trio — Ali Abdulemam, Mohammed Al Mousawi and Hussain Yousif — were held in prison for 15 days, Bahraini bloggers and forums helped bring international attention to the story while also covering protests and rallies in new ways that the traditional media couldn’t.

“[The forums] have mechanisms for when you go to demonstrations,” Al-Yousif told me. “They moblog when you go to demonstrations. They take pictures from their phones or from their digital cameras [and post] to the forums very very quickly. There’s a running update. It’s almost like there’s a guy with a computer and a headset, and a guy with a mobile at the demonstration giving him the scene, and the other guy is writing it.”

One South Asian citizen who has spent his whole life in Bahrain runs a Weblog under the pseudonym Chan’ad Bahraini. When there were protests against the arrests, Chan’ad ran a powerful eyewitness commentary with colorful photos from the demonstration, which was eventually called off when riot police showed up.

Though the trio are free now, they cannot travel from the country and might still face a trial. Meanwhile, bloggers have been worried about the MoI’s registration drive and what the government might do to them next.

“I wouldn’t say that Bahraini bloggers are living in fear, however it was quite worrying when Ali Abdulemam was arrested,” Chan’ad told me via e-mail. “Nonetheless, I think we all write quite freely without much self-censorship. The only self-censorship I do is to make sure I don’t have any vicious personal attacks against members of the royal family … but there is plenty of civilized criticism of them.”

Al-Yousif says he doesn’t read the forums, which he says have become addictive for many young people in Bahrain to “rant and rave.” He says the main government Internet provider, Batelco, now offers ADSL high-speed access, which is then distributed throughout villages on the sly through what is called “ThiefNet.” Al-Yousif believes that if the government does clamp down on bloggers and forums, the Netizens will just operate anonymously and continue in the cat-and-mouse game of getting to blocked sites through proxy servers.

“Everything that comes through Bahrain is cached,” Al-Yousif said. “So [the government knows] the source IP — where it came from — and the destination IP because everything goes through [Batelco] so it’s very easy to do a database query to find out where that material is destined to. That’s one of the major things they’ve invested in, and it’s also the major thing that slows down the Internet [in Bahrain]. But there are services available for us to fool the system. We can set up proxy servers on our own systems, so it looks like a Chinese service requesting information through Batelco. What they’ll have to do is have to get more sophisticated, but then the users will get more sophisticated to defeat them. It’s a Catch-22 situation that’s pointless.”

While a recent report by the OpenNet Initiative on Bahrain’s Internet site-blocking showed only a small percentage of sites were blocked in-country — some porn sites and Bahrainonline — bloggers say that the government has been taking more measures to block sites, including proxy servers.

“After the announcement of the Web registration drive a couple weeks ago, it seems the government has been working harder to make sure that blocked sites stayed blocked,” Chan’ad said. “Previously, it was extremely easy to access a blocked site by using one of the many free proxy servers or by going through sites such as Proxify.com. But now most of these have all been blocked too, so it’s getting tougher to access blocked sites.”

How free is the press?

When it comes to press freedom in Bahrain and other Gulf countries, contradictions abound. The history of the media has been one of tight state control and censorship, only recently loosened by satellite TV such as Al-Jazeera and Internet access to blogs and forums. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have been at the forefront of liberalization of press freedom in the Gulf, but these are small steps so far.

Qaedi, the government media attaché, made sure to tout the fact that Bahrain was recently chosen to host the Gulf Press Club. “This is a great honor for Bahrain to be a home to journalists and editors from throughout the Gulf countries and is a further indicator of our interests to encourage openness and reporting as well as the growth and development of journalism in Bahrain as part of reform initiatives,” Qaedi said. “Hopefully, the establishment of these institutions will help bolster our democratic reform initiatives and be a successful example of our efforts to encourage confidence in Bahrain’s progress.”

The Gulf Daily News recently blared a front page headline, “The Right to Know,” in reference to the Prime Minister’s meeting with the Bahrain Journalists’ Association. “As long as it is honest and in the national interest, freedom of the press will not be touched,” he said.

However, not mentioned in the article is Law 47, passed in 2002, which restricts the rights of journalists and threatens fines, prison terms or publication closure for “blaspheming the King, denigrating the state religion, propagating national disunity and sectarianism, or calling to overthrow the political regime.”

Qaedi explained some of the government’s concerns with online speech.

“People are free to express their opinions on the Internet,” he said. “It’s just that there are concerns with the type of issues that are presented. Some of these forums, they say things that perpetuate false information. For example, they stir up false accusations. That’s what the government is concerned with. It’s not that they don’t like to hear critiques — not at all. For example, there are a lot of groups on the Internet that are advocating hate against individuals in the government. You never know where these things will lead. Imagine in the U.S. if someone threatened people from the Bush administration online. Bahrain understands these issues, and it’s a transitional democracy, and these issues are inevitable. Not everyone is going to like what everyone else has to say, but that’s the way it is in a democracy, we understand that.”

The Gulf Daily News itself has become a more liberal outlet for news, and its news editor Amira al-Hussaini has penned some eye-opening screeds against limits to democracy in Bahrain.

“Why is Bahrain stubbornly disrespecting its citizens and refusing them space to breathe and develop and learn to respect themselves and others in the process?” al-Hussaini wrote in a column on the registration drive. “Democracy is not born overnight. It is a long learning process and trial and error are acceptable as long as mutual respect and the will to make things work for the benefit of all are there. Is freedom of expression just a sound bite under our own version of Bahraini democracy?”

Though she has more freedom to write in her newspaper column than almost all Bahraini journalists before her, al-Hussaini also keeps a Weblog under the pseudonym Silly Bahraini Girl to write with even less constraints. Despite the breezy title, al-Hussaini has taken on deeper issues on her blog, and has even set up a blog called Free Ahmed to highlight the plight of a friend who’s been in jail without a trial for the past year.

“I self-censor myself [in the newspaper], but not because of fear, but because of understanding of the culture,” al-Hussaini told me. “The media hasn’t been very outspoken, but it’s been more outspoken that it has ever been in the past. Five years ago you wouldn’t imagine that we could get away with everything that we write now. To the Western media, it’s not that big of a deal, but to the Bahraini people where everyone knows everyone, there is the Arab tradition, the respect for the elders for the ideology. To come out and say that this is wrong and this shouldn’t be done is sort of taboo — not because of the government laws but because of the culture and traditions and respect.”

While Arabic forums such as Bahrainonline have been hugely popular — and do break news as well — the blogosphere there still operates somewhat under the radar of authorities, especially the English-language ones. There’s a nice blog index called Bahrainblogs.com, and when reading the blogs, you notice how much the bloggers comment on each other’s posts. The tight-knit group has even started monthly Meetups to see each other face to face. Al-Yousif told me there has even been a government representative joining the bloggers to hear their views on censorship and registration.

Al-Yousif believes that Bahrain is a place where back-room deals get you much further than agitating on the streets. He says that a meeting with a well-placed prince could help the bloggers’ cause in changing the registration rule much more than an online petition.

“If we can get quite a few of the unanonymous bloggers to come forward, we can write a letter or meet with one of the various princes who have some kind of influence,” Al-Yousif said. “So he would go and mention this to the Ministry of Information indirectly. Everything is done in this country indirectly. Nothing is done as a direct action … If you go confrontational, the only thing that will happen is you will get a severe reaction. They would confiscate your material. It’s just not worth doing it like that. And that’s probably true in the whole Arab world. You would have to shake some hands, kiss some sheiks and get your own group going.”

John Elan is a blogger who grew up in Bahrain but now lives in the United States. He told me the government is vulnerable to international pressure, but might take action to silence online voices in more discreet ways — relatives harassed, loans denied, job promotions rejected.

“This is a democratic experiment that has to work,” Elan told me via e-mail. “Whatever happens in Bahrain will be what other nations in the region will emulate. If it turns out to be a sham in Bahrain, the other nations will install sham democracies. If it turns out to be a genuine system, then other nations will feel the pressure from their own people to install a genuine system of participation and fairness. That’s what is at stake and the West must do what it can to preserve a favorable outcome.”

* * *

Voices of Bahrain
More blogger and government comments on the registration drive and other issues in Bahrain.

Mixed messages from government on registration:

“Due to our reactions (the bloggers and the Gulf Daily News columnists), the ministry has come out and categorically said (via the undersecretary Mahmood Al-Mahmood) that registration is no longer ‘mandatory,’ however a couple of days after that, another undersecretary at the same ministry commented on an article on Al-Wasat newspaper with fire and brimstone where the whole registration process is to (1) protect the authors’ copyright, (2) hold people liable for what they write!! and to (3) protect against child pornography and (4) ‘immoral’ sites being created in Bahrain. Any moderately observant person would find complete contradiction in these goals. Not, apparently, anyone at the ministry of disinformation of course.” — Blogger/entrepreneur Mahmood al-Yousif

Government motivation for registration:

“It’s just a knee-jerk reaction. Someone woke up in the morning and surfed the Internet and realized, hey, there are people speaking, there are people thinking, let’s control it. Most of the Bahraini blogs are on one site, Bahrainblogs.com, and they can access them, they are open to everyone.” — Blogger/journalist Amira al-Hussaini

Context from government on registration drive:

“Of course this registration is an innovation. It hasn’t been done before, so we want to try it out and see how it works out. We’re not excluding anyone from consultation. The Press and Publications office is continuing to consult with people to gauge feedback. Unfortunately the initial publicity was negative, because when you mention ‘registration’ people tend to be somewhat skeptical. Just like if you buy a piece of land or start a magazine, you have to register your business, and we want to see if this will work with the Internet. There will be challenges, of course, and this is where we want to collaborate with the Internet users and forums to see what they think. Everybody’s welcome to give feedback.” — Dr. Nasser Qaedi, media attaché in the Foreign Media Affairs office of the MoI in Bahrain

Reactions to the arrest of the Bahrainonline trio:

“Ali Abdulemam was the first webmaster to face arrest and trial. And nearly every blogger and webmaster has wondered whether they will be the next. The more realistic fear is of having other things taken away.” — Blogger John Elan

“I can’t reason that out. I’m still very confused about that. If you say you have freedom and you have democracy in an experimental phase, this is really a time for reconciliation. Then there are bound to be mistakes on both parties, but there should never be a head-on policing like this. It should be sorted out in a manner where they say ‘OK, you’ve crossed the line, you shouldn’t do this.’ But you shouldn’t take action where you arrest people and cause protests and negative publicity for Bahrain. It’s against the spirit of liberty and democracy.” — Blogger/journalist Amira al-Hussaini

Blogger takes on situation for migrant workers:

“The situation of migrant workers is that about 35% of Bahrain’s resident population is made up of expats, mostly from South and Southeast Asia. They make up over 50% of the workforce. This figure is much higher in many neighbouring Gulf countries. Most of these workers are low-paid and often face abuse, as they have very little protection under the current laws. Housemaids especially often face physical or sexual abuse… rarely do they get justice in the end. So my aim is to highlight these issues on my blog and raise awareness about their plight. You can read all my posts on this subject here.” — Blogger Chan’ad Bahraini

Online media not just an alternative in Bahrain:

“We’re looking at this in the context that the Internet is no longer an alternate media outlet to print, but a competing outlet. We can all download music, videos, multimedia files, as well as radio and TV broadcast feeds from prominent sites such as the BBC or CNN on the Internet. We feel it’s important to protect these types of sites. Of course Bahrain wants to instill confidence in its investors, and encourage innovation and economic development. We want to put in the right safeguards to allow people to invest. We don’t want Bahrain to become a haven for homegrown illegal content.” — Media attaché Dr. Nasser Qaedi

Historical perspective on criticism in Arab media:

“Arab culture has always had outlets for participatory politics. Satire and parody have always had its place. I myself grew up with stories of Nasruddin Hodja who confronted his contemporary regents in a manner that has provided entertainment and object lessons for generations of Middle Easterners. So while I don’t necessarily self-censor, I do hope that my style can allow for all their subjects to engage in some sort of critical self-analysis.” — Blogger John Elan

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Can the Huffington Post obsess itself into the news cycle?

May 3, 2005 By 5 Comments

Politics makes for strange bedfellows, and perhaps political blogging has led to strange obsessions.

Political commentator Arianna Huffington wrote a post on her Arianna Online blog titled “A Mash Note to the Blogosphere.” She writes: “I’ve got a confession to make. I’m talking weak-in-the-knees infatuation. But it’s not Brad or Orlando or Colin or any of the cinematic hunks du jour who have set my heart aflutter. No it’s Atrios and Kos and Joshua Micah Marshall and Kausfiles and Kevin Drum and Wonkette. Bloggers all. Yes, when it comes to the blogosphere, I’m a regular cyberslut.”

Now she’s hoping to go steady, with a blockbuster news site called Huffington Post that will live a dual life — part headline news aggregator a la Drudge Report and part group blog with a roster that reads like a Who’s Who of limosine liberals (with a few conservatives thrown in): Tom Freston, Vernon Jordan, David Geffen, Nora Ephron, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Tina Brown, John Cusack, Gary Hart, Mike Nichols, Rob Reiner. (See a longer list of contributors below.)

Huffington has been no slouch herself. The Cambridge-educated Greek immigrant has authored 10 books and was previously married to Michael Huffington, the former California Republican Congressman who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate and then came out as gay. Arianna came out as a progressive liberal, though her run in the California recall election was more as a maverick.

Trying to read the tea leaves on the Huffington Post is no easy matter, and the people behind the site would prefer to stay out of the spotlight and not be pre-judged before launch — now planned for next Monday, May 9. However, a positive preview by The New York Times, with the catchy lead, “Get ready for the next level in the blogosphere,” paved the way for slams and even a spoof by the Guardian.

Delving a little deeper than the surface press releases and banter reveals mixed signs for the site and its namesake. Huffington herself seems a good fit with the blogosphere as a sharp commentator with her own talk radio show.

But if her existing Arianna Online blog is any indicator, there might be problems. She has used her site mainly to promote her books, her appearances and her syndicated column for Tribune Media Services. Her photo section is an unabashed look at all the famous people she’s befriended — many of them now participating on the group blog. Even the essay she sent me as the welcome note for Huffington Post is just an edit of her “Mash Note” posted on her blog April 7.

But on the plus side, Huffington has surrounded herself with a group that’s heavy on satire, heavy on irony and heavy on controversy. She has comedian Harry Shearer doing a journalist-watchdog feature called “Eat the Press” and has tapped former Drudge sidekick Andrew Breitbart to edit the news headline section as he did for Drudge.

Breitbart has worked for Huffington before. He is in an interesting spot, as he co-wrote the 2004 book “Hollywood, Interrupted,” a moralizing book on celebs and limo liberals that calls out various group bloggers from Huffington Post, including Rob Reiner and Norman Lear.

Breitbart wouldn’t comment for this article, but did make a statement to the blogosphere through Roger Simon’s blog.

“I like to go where the action is,” he wrote. “Bringing my former boss and longtime friend Arianna’s intriguing friends to the blogosphere, the ultimate level playing field, makes perfect sense to me, and I am thrilled to be committed to such a groundbreaking project. Will my pals on the right have a place to offer their two cents at the Huffington Post? Absolutely. Will I agree with everyone’s written word? Of course not. But that’s precisely the point. May the best ideas win.”

Huffington told me Breitbart’s news headlines would run on the right side of the home page while the group blog would be on the left side — perhaps a not-so-subtle play on their political orientation. But the wild card could be the 200 or so people that will be included in the group blog but haven’t been trumpeted to the media yet. They could be the swing vote that tips the Post in any direction.

Huffington also told me she had tapped Roy Sekoff as editor of the group blog. Sekoff was an on-air correspondent for Michael Moore’s “TV Nation” show and was targeted in a libel suit by a company he profiled that had been importing New York City waste to spread on Texas grasslands.

And the Post’s tech guru John Peretti has gained attention with his Contagious Media projects, such as forwarding his e-mails with Nike customer service when they refused to custom-stitch the word “sweatshop” on a pair of shoes. “I think the group blog and news [at the Post] will be plenty contagious on their own,” Peretti told me via e-mail. “But once the site is live, there will be endless opportunities for contributors to publish satire, links, pictures, news, or commentary.”

Huffington’s business partner in the venture is Ken Lerer, a former executive vice president at Time Warner who worked for CEO Richard Parsons. Lerer says that he was intrigued by the idea of starting a new brand online and thinks there’s room for more than one Drudge.

“There were a lot of content businesses started a long time ago when I was a lot younger,” Lerer told me. “They spent an awful lot of money establishing themselves. I don’t think you have to spend a fraction of that money to establish yourself now. Twenty years ago, it took 20 years to establish your brand. Ten years ago it took 10 years to build a brand, and five years ago it took five years. Today, I think you could build a brand in a year, and that’s all because of the Internet. So the ramp-up is so much quicker and more efficient on the Internet vs. traditional media.”

The site will start without any advertising and eventually include ads after it finds its legs. But Huffington is interested in more than just building a business. She wants to be part of the news cycle and add to the national dialogue — and wants to get there by being obsessed with stories that the mainstream media might drop.

“Reporters for the big media outlets are obsessed with novelty, always moving all-too-quickly on to the next big score or the next hot get,” Huffington wrote on her blog. “That’s when it dawned on me: the problem wasn’t that the stories I cared about aren’t being covered, it’s that they aren’t being covered in the obsessive way that breaks through the din of our 500 channel universe. Because those 500 channels don’t mean we get 500 times the examination and investigation of worthy news stories. It means we get the same narrow conventional-wisdom wrap-ups repeated 500 times.”

Huffington is even syndicating the best of the group blog in a daily Tribune Media feed, that will be copy-edited before distribution to newspapers and their associated Web sites. “I think both of us will do [copy-editing],” said John Twohey, Tribune Media vice president of editorial and operations. “She assures us that these pieces will be fact-checked and edited at her place, and as with everything else that we syndicate, we have copy editors here who will be doing the same.”

No matter how it shakes out, the Huffington Post should provide a lively online place for commentary and links to news — if she can somehow moderate all the egos filling up the virtual space. If nothing else, it will give the blogging public a target for endless satire.

The following is an edited transcript of various interviews with Huffington by phone and e-mail over the past few days.

Online Journalism Review: What is your goal with the Huffington Post, both culturally and business-wise?

Arianna Huffington: We’d like to try, if we can, to post, break and organize news in an interesting way and also add to the voices of the blogosphere on issues of interest. The blogosphere is here to stay, as it should be, and that democratization of voices is an incredibly positive development.

OJR: You said you were going to have breaking news. Would you have reporters breaking news?

AH: No, no, no. We are going to be doing news headlines and linking to news stories and breaking news when we have news break. And that will be on the right side of the home page. On the left-hand side will be the group blog.

We will be picking among the news stories, and then we’ll have a news crawl with multiple news stories beyond what we put on the home page.

OJR: What is Andrew Breitbart’s role in the operation and why did you choose him?

AH: Andrew and I have worked together for years. He worked with me before he went to Drudge. Andrew will wear many hats for us, including being in charge of the news section.

OJR: Do you find it ironic that Andrew co-wrote a scathing look at Hollywood celebrities and now will be helping run a site with the same type of celebs?

AH: I’m not sure I’d agree that these are the same type of celebrities. This isn’t the Michael Jackson or Paris Hilton group blog. But, in any case, the fact that Andrew and I may not see eye to eye on every issue will not interfere with what we are trying to do. In fact, it will enhance it.

OJR: Actually, Andrew Breitbart’s book, “Hollywood, Interrupted,” does mention a lot of the celebrities that are in the group blog, like Rob Reiner, John Cusack, Andrew Sorkin and Brian Grazer. And Andrew was moralizing about what they were doing.

AH: Right. The whole point of what we’re doing is that we don’t have people who will all agree with each other. We have invited bloggers who I’ve personally sparred with. I do a radio show on KCRW [in Santa Monica] called “Left, Right and Center.” A lot of the people who have been on the radio show with me are also blogging, people like Tony Blankley and David Frum and Byron York. And we don’t agree. They’re blogging and I’m blogging.

This is not a place you’re going to just find absolute agreement. That’s not the purpose of the site. The object is to have a debate and a national debate on issues that are important and issues that are personal and entertaining.

OJR: What are the legal hurdles — if any — for all these high-profile people to write for you, especially if they are under tight talent contracts?

AH: We’ll see as we move forward, and deal with it on a case-by-case basis.

OJR: Will there be ghost writers or assistants who might write for some of the group bloggers?

AH: That will never happen. They will never bother to do that, it’s not of any interest to them. The majority of the people are people who are on e-mail a lot, they IM their friends. What we’re asking them to do is basically tell us the thoughts they’re already having, the conversations they’re already having, the takes they’re already having.

Now some of them who don’t use a computer like Arthur Schlesinger might fax it. I personally don’t have a problem with that. I’d rather have Arthur Schlesinger online, his own voice, his own thoughts, than say, ‘You know what, you have to learn how to use our software, we can’t have you on.’ I’m sure there are some purists who think that, no, you should actually use the blogging software, you should use Movable Type. But I don’t have a problem with Arthur Schlesinger faxing me his thoughts, or someone calling from his cell phone and dictating something, but it has to be his thoughts — that has to be unequivocal.

OJR: Will you allow people to use the blog Comments function and will they be screened in any way?

AH: After we are up and running for a while, we’ll address the issue of the best way to incorporate user comments into the site.

OJR: How do you expect to make money from the site, and do you already have a sales staff in place?

AH: The site will be advertiser supported. By design, we are launching without ads so we can keep the focus on our content. Once we are up and running, we will turn our attention to getting ads. Our plan is to roll out our site slowly. We expect to refine what we have at the beginning and make changes where necessary. We are going to start slow and find our way.

OJR: What is the voice of the publication? If you’re going to include people from different modes of political thought, what can people expect to see when they visit your site?

AH: They know it will be the news. I actually believe that the news is not right-wing news or left-wing news, it’s the news. And that will be the sensibility, that will basically permeate our news coverage. Plus, the thing that the blogosphere does — similar to what you wrote about Keith Olbermann — the blogosphere allows you to be relentless. When he was covering voting irregularities, he didn’t just do one story. He did them day in and day out, and…it’s one of the key characteristics of the blogosphere that makes it an important part of what’s going on in the media right now.

So if we believe a story is important, we’ll stay on it, and stay on it and stay on it. Not just day in and day out, but hour in and hour out. And our bloggers are encouraged to look at what’s on our home page, and as well as blogging about whetever they want, blog about the stories on our home page — and having conversations with each other about our home page. I’m sure we won’t all agree but the story will be covered.

* * *

Notable Names
A partial list of contributors to the Huffington Post group blog:

Larry David, Walter Cronkite, Tom Freston, Vernon Jordan, David Geffen, Nora Ephron, Bobby Kennedy Jr., Tina Brown, John Cusack, Gary Hart, Mike Nichols, Rob Reiner, David Mamet, Arthur Schlesinger, Norman Lear, George Wolfe, Bill Maher, Jann Wenner, Laurie David, Cory Booker, Tony Blankley, Jim Wiatt, Aaron Sorkin, Haim Saban, Albert Brooks, Paul Goldberger, Harry Evans, Liev Schreiber, David Frum, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David O. Russell, Barry Diller, Tavis Smiley, Ari Emanuel, Paul Reiser, Adam McKay, Brian Grazer, Mort Zuckerman, Brad Hall, Prof. Alex Keyssar, Dr. Dean Ornish, and Sen. Jon Corzine.

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