Thursday, January 24, 2008
Sarah Boxer strikes again: Writing about blogs to the lefty intelligentsia
I have read The New York Review of Books for years, following my father's example. Painful as it may be, it is much easier to engage as a citizen if you understand the received wisdom of those with different political beliefs.
The New York Review is one of the least bloggy periodicals written for a general audience. It takes a long time to put articles online, and its editors seem genuinely mystified by the impact of blogs on political discourse in this country. Evidence: The magazine consciously or unconsciously remains the last publication in the universe to cling to Dan Rather's version of the "60 Minutes" scandal that drove him from his job (of which more later).
The current issue includes a review essay with the title "Blogs" by one Sarah Boxer [UPDATE: It is now available here.]. The article itself explains blogs to people who have no clue what they are, or might be vaguely familiar with the term.
A blog, for those who don't know, is a journal or log that appears on a Web site. It is written on line, and updated on line. It's there for anyone with an Interenet connection to see and (in many cases) comment on. The entries, or posts, are organized in reverse chronological order, like a pile of unread mail, with the newest posts on top and the older stuff on the bottom. Some blog resemble on-line magazines, complete with graphics, sidebars, and captioned photos. Others just have the name of the blog at the top and dated entries under it. You can find blogs by doing a regular Google search for the blog name (if you know it) or by doing a Google Blog search using keywords.
You get the idea.
Boxer then gives examples of blog entries and bloggy writing (she reprints these two workaday posts from Instapundit along the way), and concludes that it is so different from journalism that some actual professional journalists never get the hang of it.
Sarah Boxer may indeed be one of those writers who does not "get" blogs, even though she has edited an anthology of blog posts into a book (which only somebody who does not "get" blogs would do, a point the author gets close to making herself). Boxer is a former reporter and critic for the New York Times, and made herself rather infamous on the right side of the blogosphere by recklessly speculating -- on the basis of absolutely no evidence notwithstanding layers of fact-checkers and editors -- that the Iraqi authors of the blog Iraq the Model were CIA stooges. This was widely understood to have put their lives in serious jeopardy at a time when Iraq was especially violent and the Iraq the Model team was particularly at risk. Among the various bloggers who hammered Boxer and the Times, Jeff Jarvis was uniquely devestating.
Boxer's own close encounter with a blogswarm did not make it into her article in the New York Review even as a footnote, a failure that the editors of that august publication would regard as embarrassing if they read blogs or used Technorati, which they obviously do not. She did, however, have time to write about other blogswarms, mostly to suggest that they are grievously unfair to their targets (at least insofar as they come from the right). On Rathergate, she wrote this:
One of the surest ways to hoist your blog to the top of the charts is to bring down a big-time politician or journalist. (Bloggers who constantly dog the mainstream media, or MSM, have been dubbed the Pajamahadeen.) In 2004 the blogs Little Green Footballs and Power Line helped set Rathergate in motino when they spread the allegation that the memos Dan Rather presented on 60 Minutes II about President George W. Bush's Air National Guard duty were fakes. (Since then, a CBS panel investigating the matter has failed to prove that Rather's account of Bush's military career was substantially wrong, and Rather has pressed a suit against CBS for "wrongful dismissal.")
Boxer footnoted her "failed to prove" with a citation to James Goodale's laughable defense of Rather published shortly after Richard Thornburgh's investigation into the matter. Is "laughable" too cruel? I commend to you my own fisking -- a blog term that Boxer curiously omits from her primer -- of Goodale almost three years ago. Suffice it to say that no sane reader of the Thornburgh report would have reached the conclusions that Goodale reached, yet Boxer cited it rather than mention -- in an article about blogs -- Power Line's "Sixty-First Minute," possibly the single most famous blog post ever written, or Charles Johnson's "smoking memo" graphic, which (along with all the collateral evidence) makes it virtually impossible to conclude that the memos used by Dan Rather were anything other than forgeries.
Sarah Boxer wants to understand the intersection between blogs and journalism, but her ideology has led her astray time and time again. That she finds major media editors to publish her stories seemingly without regard for intellectual honesty ought to be disappointing. Unfortunately, it is par for the course.
5 Comments:
By 
CW, at
Thu Jan 24, 07:13:00 PM:
One key point that Boxer misses is that the best bloggers can be considered fine journalists. They have to be, otherwise consistently inaccurate bloggers would be facing blogswarms themselves.
CW
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Thu Jan 24, 07:48:00 PM:
By 
, at
Fri Jan 25, 11:51:00 AM:
Your passion on this subject is great. It's wonderful to read someone like you trying to improve on the huge problem of MSM dunderheadism.
Good luck though influencing MSM, New York version, in even a minor fashion. In the end, only a new owner will achieve real change.
By , at
Fri Jan 25, 12:46:00 PM:
I reread "Power Line's" entry on the Rather forgeries and am reminded that I've never seen an examination of what, in my mind, are also clear forgeries, the Lehman comendations in what has been published of Kerry's military file. Is there a connection between the two seta?
By naomi dagen bloom, at
Tue Jan 29, 10:51:00 AM:
your excellent review of the review needs one addition. why so much negativity by boxer toward blogs? she sounds scared!
