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I suspect there’s going to be plenty of buzz about Chad Hermann’s op-ed on the blogosphere in yesterday’s Post-Gazette. My guess is that most of the conversation will focus on Hermann himself: Is he an asshole? A closet Republican?
I’m sure that will generate all kinds of heated discussion. So I’m going to ignore that side of the topic entirely, skipping over the merits of the messenger and addressing the message.
But before I do, let me get this out of the way. I’ve met Chad, and like him. I often don’t share his judgments: For example, I thought his criticisms of Obama were unduly harsh, even when I shared some of his wariness. But I respect Chad for wrestling with these issues, and for signing his name to the things he believed. (In fact, full disclosure: The Post-Gazette piece includes an excerpt of an e-mail I sent Chad to that effect. I’m not identified as the author of that e-mail but … c’est moi.)
Hermann’s argument, briefly summarized, is that he gave up on his blog in large part because the Internet has coarsened the discourse. And it falls to the Burgher to offer the natural response: Blogging is just a medium, and it’s no more or less obnoxious than any other medium. If you don’t like the rough-and-tumble debate you find online, blame society.
I think this is both true and not.
On the one hand, yeah: If you find Chad Hermann obnoxious and self-important online, you’ll probably find the print version of Chad Hermann obnoxious and self-important too. And many of the most poisonous things you read online aren’t any worse than what you hear on talk radio. The only difference is that the things online are posted and preserved for everyone to see.
But isn’t that point? A talk-radio utterance tends to disappear into the ether the instant after it is spoken. A blog post or comment, by contrast, can last forever.
What’s more, a radio station, or a newspaper, bears a certain liability for what gets said on their platform — even by third-party commenters. City Paper can be sued for libel based on what someone says in a published letter to the editor. Bloggers are under no such constraints. Thanks to the Communications Decency Act, you can’t be sued for what someone else posts on your Web site. So while I know many responsible bloggers who police their comments section, they do so on their own hook — not because the law requires it. Inevitably, that results in comments that can be every bit as vicious, duplicitous, and ill-founded as those Hermann decries. You’ll sometimes see these on even the best sites.
And for a newspaper like mine, the electronic frontier poses some strange contradictions. While I could be sued for a letter published in the print edition, I could NOT be held liable if someone posted the EXACT SAME VERSION of the letter online. And here’s the weird part: While online stuff lasts forever, the print edition only lasts a few days. In other words, the law gives MORE protection in a context where you have LESS long-term exposure. Hell, if a story printed on paper really embarrasses you, you an always just move outside the paper’s circulation area. There’s no escape from Google.
To borrow from McLuhan, the medium IS the message. It changes the way we interpret the message, and the way we are affected by it. To pretend otherwise is, I think, a cop-out. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard the excuse “it’s just the internet” to justify some bad behavior online. But it’s juvenile to pretend that what happens online really stays there … especially in this age of Google, where our future employment prospects can be held hostage to anyone with a grudge and a Blogger account. (And isn’t this what got many people into blogging in the first place — the chance to make a difference in the real world?)
Personally, I think it’s inevitable that the law will change. In the 1990s, as the electronic frontier was opening up, the cry was to protect the internet from government intervention. Now, as the Internet becomes ever more enmeshed in everyday life, there will be calls on the government to protect people from the internet.
Newspapers are the canary in the coal mine in some respects — you can already find papers wrestling with the implications of what people post online. Even the editor of little old City Paper has felt obliged to police the comments section of some of our own stories, and even report on allegations made by commenters. For us, the internet makes a lot of work, but not a lot of money. That’s why on some level, I can’t really blame the Post-Gazette for not having comments on most of its stories, despite all the investments it’s made elsewhere online.
But unless and until the law changes, it’s going to be up to the bloggers to police themselves. In that respect, I have one piece of advice, which of course everyone is free to ignore: End anonymous posting and commenting.
Like I said, most of the bloggers I know are pretty responsible. But part of what makes them responsible, I think, is that people know them. Chris Briem does Null Space, one of the best-regarded blogs in town. Bram Reichbaum attaches his name to the Pittsburgh Comet, Ed Heath to Cognitive Dissonance and it’s no secret that the 2 Political Junkies are David DeAngelo and Maria Lupinacci. I’m guessing it’s no coincidence that these are some of the most thoughtful blogs in town.
There are exceptions to this rule on both sides, of course — the biggest being the Burgher himself (though I think I have a pretty good idea of who he is anyway). But think about it. As a rule, I enjoy 414 Grant Street, but would that site have engaged in this attack on Doug Shields if we knew who was authoring it? And is our political culture really any better off because anonymity allowed 414 to do so?
And what’s good for bloggers should be good for those who comment upon them. Sites like 2pj already require people to sign up for a blogger or other account in order to post. Of course, there’s no requirement for anyone to use their actual names, and there probably shouldn’t be. But even requiring people to use an online alias, I think, is a step toward accountability and transparency (which is a quality many local bloggers demand from those in government, after all.) Like the P-G quoted me saying to Chad, having an identity of any sort creates certain obligations — toward coherence, if nothing else. One establishes a kind of online “paper trail,” through which agendas can become clear, and by which today’s utterance can be contrasted with yesterday’s.
The objection, of course, will be that anonymity is part of what makes the blogosphere such a free-wheeling forum. Which may be true. Then again, part of what made the Coliseum such a popular attraction was the lions. We’ve devised more civilized forms of gladiatorial entertainment since the days of the Roman Empire, and we ought to find a more civilized approach to political discourse as well.
Chad apparently hoped his blog would bring about that result. Now, I guess, he’s hoping that shutting down will accomplish it instead.
This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2008.
Most of your concerns about Internet discourse strike me as incidental to Chad’s. You talk about libel a lot (to a degree I don’t want to think much about, in fact) and anonymity coarsening the discourse; he seems much more concerned about style and motives. So I’m not sure you’re capturing his brief, but its a very interesting essay all the same.
As to anonymity; I agree it’s a concern, but I don’t find it a major one. What about the person shouting something from the back of a crowded tavern? What about the obscene political graffiti that appeared all over the walls of Rome? Whisper campaigns and ugly anonymous personal attacks are a part of the culture; a bad part, but undeniably eternal. The Internet amps up the possibility of the good along with the bad, and I’m bullish on possibility taken in the aggregate. Also I think there are values to anonymous comments that offset their danger, especially when discussing a one-party government with a strong executive and well-established institutions of control.
Since you mentioned it yourself, it occurs to me that I haven’t mentioned in print except (implied) in e-mails to him; I like Chad also. Always have. When I ambush him, I do so in the spirit of homo-erotic wrestling, not martial combat. Certain aspects of the Obama jag really got to me, obviously, but even then I was glad of the opportunity to disagree vociferously. I realize it may not have come off that way, and I’d feel bad if I inadvertently made it more acceptable to wish his earthly demise.
“What about the person shouting something from the back of a crowded tavern?”
It’s true that anonymous commenters have always been with us. But like I say — they haven’t always been able to make their charges stick over time and space. The anonymous curse echoes for a moment and then is lost in the barroom’s din. The graffito’s impact is localized to those who happen to walk past that particular building. As I was trying to point out in my post, a comment online has a much greater potential impact — it is available to almost anyone at almost any time.
Of course, you’re right that some anonymous comments may be useful. Anonymous tips have always been a part of journalism itself, for that matter. But that doesn’t mean newspapers, or their readers, are well served by publishing every allegation made against someone. (In fact, isn’t the media’s willingness to play up such rumors a big part of what people object to?) And I’m not sure the blogosphere is well-served by doing so either. How many times have you, or the Burgher, suspected posts of being made by the Ravenstahl administration itself, in an effort to cloud the issue? Assuming you’re right, is a reader of those comments really better off than if there were fewer comments to begin with, made by people a little more willing to own up to what they were saying?
The blogosphere’s premise, it seems, is that more factual assertions — you’ll note that I don’t say “more information” or “more facts” — are an unmitigated good. But I’m not sure that’s true at all. Take the blogosphere out of the equation for a second: Are we, as a people, any better informed because we live in a 24/7 news cycle served by multiple cable news channels? The evidence is mixed at best. In fact, lots of times the 24/7 news cycle is cited as an OBSTACLE to real understanding — hence the talk of “feeding the beast” and so on. Often what those channels do is merely give each side more ammunition to argue against the other — thereby confirming the prejudices and preferences of each. (For the uncommitted folks in the middle, meanwhile, the fact that so many conflicting “facts” are available may simply cause them to throw up their hands, and doubt the value of factual knowledge itself. These are, I suspect, some of the folks who end up voting for the candidate they’d like to have a beer with.)
Hermann’s essay notes the danger: “Most [blog] readers and almost as many of its writers don’t want to think new thoughts or learn new things; they want to find new ways of believing and justifying the old ones.” I’m not sure that’s a fair assessment of the bloggers I know, and it’s certainly not limited to blogs. It seems to be an inevitable result of our “information society” as it currently exists. I’m not saying we dispense with that society at all … I’m just suggesting that we should start to acknowledge some of its problems, instead of just engaging in this electronic triumphalism. Anonymity is one aspect of the problem, and a particularly interesting one to me. But it’s not the whole story.
In any case, it may not be a coincidence that locally, at least, one of the most lasting contributions the Burghosphere made to political cultural was made by a local blogger who chose to act like a reporter. Instead of merely posting an anonymous assertion online, the blogger in question called up the subject of that rumor and asked for a response. But then I’m sure I don’t have to remind YOU of how that incident played out, Bram.
I should also add that alt-weeklies like this one are fully implicated in the problems I just spelled out. They are avowedly progressive in their political orientation, after all, which means they too risk merely confirming people in beliefs they wanted to hold anyway. My defense, and it may be inadequate to some, is that papers like this arose in large part because they found claims of journalistic objectivity suspect, and thought it would be better to lay out their beliefs in clear view. Which is, essentially, just another form of the disclosure I’m asking for.
“How many times have you, or the Burgher, suspected posts of being made by the Ravenstahl administration itself, in an effort to cloud the issue?”
Love that. They always reveal their vulnerabilities and their next moves.
However, all your points are well taken — particularly the permanence point.
I almost got to work this afternoon* writing a serious response piece to the point both Chad and you make about the selective, self-confirming nature of blog audiences, and also to the point you expand it to by making it about the “awful” 24-hour news cycle. I would argue that although we may be suffering from too much of these services when it comes to national politics, when it comes to the local scene we suffer from FAR TOO LITTLE of this phenomenon. Everything in moderation, right? Where are Pittsburgh’s Meet the Press, let alone it’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann? We don’t have ANY options for scrutinizing local politics, let alone from a reasonably modest variety of perspectives … and we have a local political “news hole” the size of I’m thinking of something really dirty.
Now that John McIntire has been felled roughly to our level and is focusing more on national headlines and less aggravating news … am I really Pittsburgh media’s most prominent and outspoken mayoral critic? That’s insane! That’s monstrous! Given Ravenstahl, that’s especially dangerous, but under any administration — leaving that title to an amateur independent blogger is a depressing state of affairs.
I’ll take some of the extra scrutiny of a more steroided-out contemporary media environment, and with it gladly accept a degree of coarseness or intermittent inanity that would accompany it. Just because we’re sick of the likes of Fox and Kos doesn’t mean we couldn’t profit a HUGE dose of that very thing locally. If only to reveal that local politics is interesting.
(I say I “almost” wrote that response piece this afternoon because instead I somehow got to composing an “homage” to TWM, commenting on Chad’s recent piece in TWM’s signature line-by-line style. I got about a third of the way through before realizing this is a project that needs to be tackled in small doses, if it needs to be completed at all, which is another subject.)
I always had trouble with the thought that I had to email Chad Hermann to comment on something he wrote. I think that if there is any chance for discourse in blogs, it is through public comments. Sure, some comments are poorly written. If I support the commenters’ position, I cringe. But more often than not, the badly written comments are something I disagree with, and I am content to let the comments speak for themselves. But I think that only accepting emails, and then only reprinting the parts of the emails you want to agree with or tear apart, is fundamentally against the spirit of blogging, such as there is one. And frankly, the email could be changed as it is reprinted, or even just created. Not saying Chad ever did anything like that, but others following his example might.
Blogger and other blogging software is hardly perfect, even if you tighten the rules. But it makes it harder to spoof, maybe hard enough most people would not want to bother.
For what it is worth, Pat Dowd was(is?) a big proponent of not allowing anonymous comments in political discussions on blogs. I think it frustrated him that the best that could be achieved is consistent handles.
I’ve heard several things about Dr Hermann working for Republicans. Until recently I had heard he is working for Tim Murphy, but then just recently I heard that he isn’t. It doesn’t really matter, except that I and I believe others wondered if he had an agenda in holding Barack Obama to a higher standard, and attacking Obama (and not so much McCain or other Republicans) pretty mercilessly.
My understanding is that Chad did some work for Murphy early this year, but that he hasn’t been involved in the campaign for several months now.
Your point about comments is a good one, Ed: I don’t know much about the “fundamental spirit of blogging,” except that it seems to involve writing shorter posts than I’m accustomed to writing. But just as a matter of fairness, if you want to engage in a back-and-forth with readers in view of the public, the public arguably should see the readers’ comments in their proper context. Otherwise you risk abusing your power to control the parameters of the debate. (I have no reason to think Chad does this, of course. And for what it’s worth, his P-G piece accurately and fairly quotes the e-mail I sent to him.)
Then again, there’s nothing to prevent a commenter from posting their full-fledged response on his or her own blog, or in the comments section of a third party. (As you yourself have demonstrated quite nicely.) And Chad doesn’t have a monopoly on this. Radio talk-show hosts cut callers off all the time, and then there’s the Ruth Ann Daily-style “get a load of the idiotic e-mails sent by the morons who disagree with me” columns. I may have written one of those myself, actually.
The full quote from the comment that so offended Chad:
Perhaps I’m blinded by my rational hatred for Chad Hermann, but that guy in the video (bearded, sloppy, poney-tailed and self-righteous) is exactly how I picture him when I imagine him dying of stomach cancer. It also helps that he’s fighting with an African-American female. I think Chad thinks about doing that a lot in his car … with the windows rolled up … and the doors locked.
Thought he would have thicker skin than that, but the author certainly didn’t threaten him.
I should also note that I occassionally exchanged e-mails with Chad, even agreeing with him once or twice, but really would have appreciated some candor on his part with respect to his Republican affiliations. Perhaps he isn’t such an independent thinker afterall, but just a company man.
While we are on the subject of context … unfortunately, the blogger who wrote the line about Palin’s “retarded” daughter seems to have taken the down the whole post. Chad’s phraseology [and we know how good and thoughtful a writer he is] suggested that the blogger was “attacking” Palin for her autistic daughter. As I remember it, the blogger was declaring said daughter to be non-issue and unsuitable as a topic of public discussion. But a reader of the Sunday paper, particularly a Republican one, would be left with a very different impression — and would think just that much less of Pittsburgh’s local bloggers, that single word “retarded” being the only word quoted to represent us.
This is why I’m going back and forth on whether to bother actually responding with a post instead of sprinkling offhand comments about as they occur to me. On the one hand the last thing I want to do is give Chad an excuse to congratulate himself — “Look, it’s days later, they still can’t stop talking about me!” — but on the other hand I feel a more serious response is required.
I gave up on the homage/parody, BTW [shivers].