Getting Real

I've written before about those who don't seem to get it about blogging. Barbara O'Brien gets it, but Matt Bai will be previewing the upcoming Yearly Kos convention in Las Vegas (June 8-11) for The New York Times magazine and it doesn't appear the he does.

O'Brien:

Sure there is still plenty of politicking going on in banquet halls and airport hangars. But these days most politics happens in media, not in the flesh. And the biggest part of that media is electronic — television and radio — with political hacks and professional insiders serving as the self-appointed proxies of We, the People.

In the mass media age political discourse devolved into something like puppet theater. We turn on the little puppet theater box in our living rooms and watch representative partisans bash each other like Punch and Judy. And we know their strings are being pulled by more powerful forces hidden behind the scenery. The performance may be entertaining, but the audience can only watch, passively. The audience has no part in the script.

Exactly how is that more “real” than the Internet?

It is telling that the artificiality of mass media politics is invisible to a mainstream political journalist like Mr. Bai. For many years professional pundits, Washington journalists, political operatives, and elected officials have been carrying on the nation’s political discourse by themselves inside the puppet theater, and the discussion reflects their perspectives, their interests, their biases. The vast and silent audience may have entirely different concerns, but the audience doesn’t get to take part in the discussion.

[...]

The Blogosphere has created a place where We, the People, can bypass the media and talk to each other about what interests us. Here we decide what topics are “hot.” We decide what information we need to make informed decisions, and collectively we find that information and publish it. It’s true that only a small portion of adult Americans have become active bloggers and blog readers. So far. But I believe this portion will grow, especially as more people have access to broadband and learn that joining in the Grand Discussion is as easy as breathing. And audio-visual blogging — for those who don’t like to keyboard — is on the way.

Mass media politics is not just oblivious to the audience. It’s also expensive, and the need for politicians to raise obscene amounts of money to wage a media campaign has nearly destroyed even the pretense that our elected representatives in Washington are looking out for their constituents. No, they are looking out for their big campaign contributors. They are looking out for lobbyists that represent special interests capable of raising lots of money. The Enron story highlights the way politicians and corporations look out for each other. Enron is an exception only in the fact that the execs got caught before the Bush Administration was able to save them. Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, even Rupert Murdoch’s recent fundraiser for Hillary Clinton — it’s all about money, and it’s all about mass media politics.

This trend has got to stop, somehow, or we might as well dissolve Congress and hand the government over to the suits in the boardrooms. So far, the Internet seems to be our best hope of breaking the mass media monopoly on politics.

That’s what’s “real,” Mr. Bai.