View From a Height

The Blogosphere Graduates

Ah, well, the blogsphere is starting to grow up. For a long time, it lived in sort of a frat house neighborhood of the Internet, insulated from the real world. I was commenting to Rich at the President's Greeley rally that there was a sort of sophmoric, collegiate feel to the blogosphere.

Now, with the election signifying a sort of graduation ceremony, bloggers are looking around asking, "where's the beer?"

Well, part of the real world is the Government. Things you could get away with in college suddenly pack Consequences in the Real World. Captain Ed has been all over the story of Jon Lauck's being a consultant for the Thune campaign. In the end, it Lauck's ethics come off considerably better than those of his accusers at CBS.

But now, CBS is talking about government regulation of the Internet's political speech, sort of an FEC Blog Patrol. Having grabbed defeat-by-blog from the jaws of victory-by-McCain-Feingold, the MSM is now turning to its big brother to close off this front.

Well, just like in the Real World, there are some things too big for the Government.

The goal isn't to ban certain types of political speech, but to catch coordination with campaigns. The response time of the blogosphere is way too short - frequently minutes - so that stories that might look like cooperation is really just a complicated game of telephone.

Even under the old rules, coordination was virtually impossible to prove. One of my b-school ethics professors used to be the Chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party. When I asked him in class what sort of coordination was permitted between the candidates and the party, he replied, "None. But I'd have had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to be able to read the papers and see frompublic statements where the party could help out." No word on his pinball skills.

This isn't to say that the blogosphere is unaccountable. It's accountable to its market - readers who want informed opinion, and want to inform their own opinions. Eventually, the blogosphere looks less like the Front Page and more like the op-ed pages. Facts matter, in support of informed opinion. We'll end up adopting something that looks like the current journalistic ethics, because those have been tested through experience.

The problem with the MSM isn't that they don't have standards. It's that they're evidently incapable of living up to them.