What Forgerygate Has Taught Me
';I am following with great interest the developments of Forgerygate here, here, and here. It is amazing how the blogosphere has been able to influence public perceptions, and make the mainstream media really sit up and take notice. In the grander scheme of things, this may even influence the results of the US election. Which may also have repercussions here in Israel.
Wow.
But something else is striking me about this emerging story. I guess it really struck me when I read this post on the qualifications of some of the bloggers covering this story.
When he’s not in his pajamas, John H. Hinderaker, “Hindrocket” of Power Line, is affiliated with the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Policy and is a partner in the Minneapolis law firm Faegre & Benson. His practice history includes “twenty-six years [in] a broad-based and varied commercial litigation practice. A veteran of more than 80 jury trials, he has appeared in courts in fifteen states.” J.D. cum laude from Harvard; A.B. magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth — yeah, I think I’ve heard of those schools. Scott Johnson, Power Line’s “Big Trunk,” is also affiliated with Claremont, and probably doesn’t wear pajamas to his day job as “an attorney and senior vice president of TCF National Bank in Minneapolis.” Power Line’s “Deacon” is Paul E. Mirengoff, a partner in the Washington office of mega-firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld (where his partners include uber-Dems Bob Strauss and Vernon Jordan). In addition to government service in the Office of the General Counsel of the EEOC, his credential include an undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, in 1971 from Dartmouth College, and a J.D. in 1974 from Stanford Law School, where he served on the Stanford Law Review.The Godfather of law bloggers, of course, is the InstaPundit himself, Glenn Reynolds. Again, his blog bio is pretty modest, but if you dig a bit deeper, you’ll find that Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law. (Endowed professorships are a very big deal, even for a full professor at any law school.) His legal and popular-press publications list is a mile long — the top-tier law reviews in which he’s published scholarly articles include Columbia, Virginia, Penn, and Wisconsin — and he has a BA from Tennessee in 1982 and a JD from Yale Law School in 1985.
This comment to the post even reveals a “deity” lawyer.
We are not dealing with people who ostensibly have a lot of free time. We are dealing with people with real careers and real responsibilities. So what amazes me is how these bloggers find the time to not only blog extensively on stories such as Forgerygate (amongst others), but also conduct extensive research as part of their blogging. For instance, how do they have the time to perform analyses on the typography of documents and 1970s era typewriters? (In Glenn Reynold’s case, I have no idea how he finds the time to generally blog so prolifically and continue his day job). You could say that these bloggers are working in their professions and doing the job of journalists.
Which brings me to one of the following possible conclusions:
1. These bloggers are bono fide geniuses, who can blog extensively, without letting it affect their day jobs.
2. These bloggers are smart, but are perhaps blogging to the detriment of their day jobs.
3. These bloggers have “interns” who help them blog, so that it does not adversely affect their day jobs.
I suspect that the answer is 1. For instance, the Power Line lawyers have amazing credentials and senior positions. I doubt they could get away with neglecting their careers. In the case of Glenn Reynolds, he is blogging with the full knowledge of his employer.
But whatever the answer, I find their blogging output amazing. And they are not only influencing hearts and minds, but also actual events, as indicated by Forgerygate.
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An Australian immigrant to Israel, Aussie Dave has been blogging since early 2003.
September 13th, 2004 at 9:43 am
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I suspect that the answer is 1.
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I think you are right, although I’m sure it is a mixture to some degree. As for Dan Rather and the Pajama comment……I put Rather in the pajamas that Glenn Rynolds linked to.
http://spitballdefense.blogs.com/spitblog/2004/09/blogfather.html
September 13th, 2004 at 2:08 pm
I think you’re way too nice. The possibility that I would subscribe to is that in this day and age, the need for a generic specialization in “journalism” has largely evaporated, and that a domain expert can communicate a lot better about his domain than a journalist can communicate about any domain. The Internet and then the blogosphere have made it progressively easier to aggregate the opinions of various domain experts, thereby bypassing the journalists’ role as content filters. The upshot is that some guy in his pajamas with a broadband feed is just as good as a journalist, and can be better in certain situations because he can move faster, unhindered by committees and editors.
As Wretchard posted, we relied on the fact that legacy media had enough investment in their own reputation for correctness that they would defend it. It actually turns out that the guy in his pajamas cares a lot more than CBS does.
Recap: I think we need option 4 - bloggers are ordinary people who are better at analysing and communicating facts than journalists. This tells us something about the state of journalism in this day and age more than it tells us anything about the quality of blogging, but it’s still an interesting way of looking at this.