Bloggers and Contemporary Historiography

As I watch the storm over Kerry's Vietnam record grow, I believe that future historians will mine the historiography of both the mainstream media and the blogosphere in much the way they do manuscript collections, old newspapers, and diaries. Because in addition to the more traditional scholarly and primary source literature that every important election leaves behind, this one will be the first to include blogs.

That will be an immense and important task. No one could have predicted only a couple of years ago that blogs would force the hands of the major media. Rather than killing stories through neglect, the big papers and networks have been embarrassed into covering them, albeit often late and with a sneer. Wilfred McClay was correct when he wrote here this past week that blogs are often parasitic to the mainstream media. That is, few of us possess the resources (or the time) to do the footwork necessary to uncover and interview sources. That said, Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Captain’sQuarters, Powerline, and others did indeed engage in primary source work, and their stories on the Swift Boat Vets – including research into the veracity of the Vets’ claims – have played key roles in both keeping the story alive and in bringing about additional coverage from the big papers. That role, and the roles played by countless smaller blogs, has already had an enormous impact on the coverage of an election still two months away.

In some sense blogs are fulfilling a mission analogous to that held by referees for scholarly journals. Once an article is submitted to such a publication, an editor sends it to other specialists so that its integrity can be verified. In the humanities, the goal isn't to ensure universal agreement with the author's conclusions – that’s not the way such scholarship works. Within the sciences, a key goal is the possibility of replicating the results claimed by the authors. Such a system can help ensure that charlatans are kept out of key journals or presses.

But of course any system is only as good as the people who oversee it, and when those responsible for ensuring that conclusions are supportable through traditional methods of research supplement advocacy for fair-mindedness, a system is seriously weakened. That’s what happened to America’s mainstream media in the post-WWII period: liberal elitism supplanted what was earlier seen as partisan coverage of major events, but it did so under the aegis of objectivity. Of course, similarly slanted coverage posing as enlightened thought occurred in the pre-war period – think of the loathsome and mendacious denial of Stalin’s starvation policy in Ukraine that won the New York Times’s Walter Duranty a Pulitzer – but it wasn’t until after the war that a sufficient number of major dailies, supplemented by the new medium of television, tilted the balance of daily news coverage.

Dave Kopel, writing in today’s Rocky Mountain News, compares the presidential election of 1964 with today’s. Lyndon Johnson lied about his WWII service baldly and repeatedly, and yet, as Kopel argues, journalists gave him a pass. Their willful ignorance had two principal causes: first, any reporter attempting to break the story would have found his story buried. That’s because of the second reason: LBJ was “the darling of the establishment media” in 1964. He carried the mantel of the martyr of Camelot, JFK, and his opponent, Barry Goldwater, was the politician most hated by the left since Joe McCarthy.

Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard chronicles the blogoshere’s role in the Swift Vets’ story:

“But the big news on August 6 was that Regnery allowed people to download the ‘Christmas in Cambodia’ section of O'Neill's book. While [Keith] Olbermann and others were worrying about mystical jazz, the new media swung into action. Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, Powerline, and other bloggers immediately began investigating the book's allegations. The blog JustOneMinute was the first to find the 1986 ‘seared —seared’ speech in which Kerry described his memory of being in Cambodia in December 1968. On August 8, Reynolds took his digital camera to the University of Tennessee law library and photographed the section of the Congressional Record with the Kerry speech, further verifying the chapter’s central claim. That same weekend, Al Hunt talked about the Swift boat ad on CNN's Capital Gang, calling it ‘some of the sleaziest lies I've ever seen in politics.’”

As he goes on to prove, and as close observers know, mainstream news organs finally paid some attention to the story, but most of that coverage was spurred by Kerry’s denunciations of the Swift Vets and did little more than provide an echo chamber for his denials. Yet Last’s principal point, which he shares with bloggers, remains: “[T]he baying of the Times and the rest of the old media is a sign of capitulation. Against their will, the best-funded and most prestigious journalists in America have been forced to cover a story they want no part of – or at the very least, they've been compelled to explain why they aren't covering it.”

Which brings us back to the sources for scholars of this election. If you’re still getting used to footnote citations of web sites, wait until you see them for blogs. Not most blogs, mind you, any more than footnotes include most articles or most books. But certain key blogs that uncovered important information, or whose corroboration of claims gave life to stories whose impact, in retrospect, can fairly be called significant, will make their way into the literature of the period. As will, no doubt, the rise of the blogosphere and other alternative media (talk radio, cable television) and their collective roles in transforming opinion-making in America. We’ve turned a corner, and historians will be looking back to discern how we did it, and what it means.