In fact, as I'm typing this in the middle of the day, someone just sent me an instant message on meebo with a link to cnn.com's story on Al Gore's son getting arrested on the 4th of July for speeding and possession! If I want to be kept up to date on the latest "celebrity" DUI drama, but don't want to read about the downers of "real" news (is that war still going on? are we really killing the penguins at the North Pole with our Hummers?), I can just click the link, read the story, and leave the CNN site. Even CNN can't be all serious, all the time - sometimes it needs to give the people what they want... dirt!
Which leads me to the
real subject of this post --- the political blog. After reading the dirt on Al Gore III, the news-conscient can browse through CNN's website and come across Anderson Cooper's 360 blog. Not withstanding that Anderson may well be the most adorable news anchor ever, he is also an excellent example of how legitimate news sources have widely embraced the blog, which just ten years ago was nonexistent. Cooper's blog, to whom others beside him contribute, and where readers can post comments directed at either the blog's content or other readers' remarks, covers a relatively flexible spectrum of news topics. Recent posts from the past week cover the car bomb attempts in London, the blog's search for an official theme song (Air Supply, anyone?), and of course the 2008 elections.Cooper's blog shows the two most important aspects of a political (and in fact, any) blog -- it allows for opinion ("it may already be too late for candidates who are trailing in fundraising or the polls. That may sound rude and wrong, but it's right on the money," writes Tom Foreman, the CNN correspondent who posted this particular entry) and it encourages reader interaction ("Here's my question: Which top-tier candidate do you think runs the greatest risk of falling back into the minors?"). Blog readers aren't looking for objective reportage when browsing through the blogoshpere. For the most part, blogs "preach to the choir" -- blogsforbush offers exactly what its title promises, a Bush administration-friendly, anti-Democrat slant. Meanwhile, liberals who go to dailykos.com will most likely find their own opinions validated. However, regardless of blogs' tendency to run along partisan lines, they do offer one thing that traditional journalism does not: the element of (anonymous) interaction.
First and foremost, blogs give people who aren't Anderson Cooper or Bill O'Reilly with a television show outlet to voice their opinions the chance to speak their mind to an endless audience. Any Joe Shmoe with Internet access can suddenly mouth off on the war, on the election, on Paris Hilton going to jail - on anything! and have no real limits to what he (or she, or they) can say. The regular citizen thus can interact with the whole world. More importantly, the whole world can interact right back. Most blogs enable comments and some allow private messages to be sent via email, so that readers can voice their reaction to whatever they read on a blog. Blog comments are, essentially, the traditional "letter to the editor" updated and, for the most part, unedited.
How the Political Blog Made Waves
Although the political blog has been around for nearly a decade, with some of the first being Bob Somerby's Daily Howler begun in 1998 and Mickey Kaus' Kausfiles started in 1999, it was not until 2002 that the phenomenon began to spread like cyber wildfire.
When U.S. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott suggested that the United States would have benefited if Strom Thurmond had been elected President in the 1948 elections, many cried "racially-insensitive foul!" Thurmond's platform had greatly focused on racial segregation, a truly un-politically correct thing to still advocate half a century later. Blogs like Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo posted transcripts of interviews and relevant articles that created a sort of underground anti-Lott frenzy that eventually played a part in Lott's stepping down as Majority Leader -- nd all this without any initial mainstream media attention given to the story! The Lott incident validated the influence blogs have in perpetuating information and garnering public interest, even outrage. Although for the most part blogs cover information already covered by the media, the Lott/Thurmond story is not the only incident which bloggers covered before mainstream news coverage. A few New Orleans residents with blogs whose Internet signal held up were the first to post images online of the disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Just this year, students at Virginia Tech used their blogs to record minute-by-minute developments and communicating their own survival to far-away families and friends. (Granted, these don't originally fit into the "political blog" category, but since many of the reactions to these blogs were related to political issues like emergency response and gun control, I am including them under this heading).
There are many, many political blogs out there to date. In the ever-developing meta-layered blogosphere, some political blogs like rightwingnews.com rank the popularity of political blogs. According to rightwingnews (at number 18 on this list), andrewsullivan.com (The Daily Dish) is the most popular political blog, ranking in as the Internet's 7,203rd most popular site! A look at Sullivan's recent posts (titled "Things We Love About America") reveals another key factor of blog popularity - the video post!
The technical possibilities of the modern blog are pretty exhaustive and impressive considering the quick evolution of this recent invention. From linking to other sites (as this entry is doing) and posting images related to post (ditto), the blogger can also include video footage (which I keep trying to do but gets erased so it may or may not appear when you are reading this). With the eruption of YouTube in recent years, bloggers use vehicles like YouTube to post relevant footage. For example, here is (or should be, depending on how this works out) Hilary Clinton responding to President George W. Bush's decision to pardon "Scooter" Libby. This, of course, despite the President's promise to assure full punishment to whoever the "leak" in the Valerie Wilson case turned out to be.
Libby served as chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney and was his assistant for national security affairs as well as President George W. Bush's assistant from 2001 to 2005. The first sitting White House official to be indicted in 130 years, Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison after being found guilty of four out of five federal offenses related to the Valerie Wilson case, whose secret identity as a covert CIA operative in Africa was revealed in 2003.
Of course, Republicans/Conservatives aren't the only ones who manage to get themselves involved in political and media scandals which are then fodder for the blogarazzi. Democrats/Liberals came under fire, partially from bloggers, for the "Rathergate" scandal in 2004. When on September 8, 2004 CBS veteran Dan Rather introduced on 60 Minutes supposedly authentic documents (referred to as the "Killian documents) that challenged President Bush's military service record, it turned out that in fact the documents had never been properly background checked, and may have been forgeries. Conservative bloggers the nation over criticized this scandal as proof of Democrats' attempt to sabotage the elections (clearly this attempt, if true, failed) and further solidified Rather's reputation as being liberally biased. The massive blog attention given to this incident further established the power of the political blog as able to apply political sources. Some believe that Dan Rather's departure two years later after forty-four years at CBS was related to the "Rathergate" incident. Rather's statement upon leaving CBS were not exactly friendly:
My departure before the term of my contract represents CBS's final acknowledgement, after a protracted struggle, that they had not lived up to their obligation to allow me to do substantive work there. As for their offers of a future with only an office but no assignments, it just isn't in me to sit around doing nothing.
Many popular political bloggers move on from the blogosphere and into the "real" world - generally television. Among them are Duncan Black of eschaton, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of Dailykos, Alex Steffen of Worldchanging, and Ana Marie Cox of wonkette, who will be further discussed below. Perhaps this can be taken, cautiously, to indicate that most people, given the opportunity to get personal recognition, basically to put a face to the person behind the blog, will jump at the chance. Of course, it could just mean that by becoming more main-stream, they will get more attention for their blog and thus more readers - more influence.
The Blog in (as?) Fiction
Having discussed the weight political blogs can carry, and the influence individual bloggers can have on their readership, let's look at the phenomenon of blogs moving from the cyber world into the print world, and then at how blogging is actually (potentially) changing the idea of the "novel."
Among the Washington D.C. blog genre, wonkette.com covers the usual D.C.-related dirt, news stories, occasional entertainment industry gossip, and every now and then - itself. (Check out wonkette discussing its very own previous editor Ana Marie Cox, whose novel Dog Days is the slightly silly story of a campaign aide's mishaps, including fabricating a wildly successful, sexy tell-all-without-telling-a-thing 
blog about D.C. sexcapades). Responses to the book, published in 2006, were lukewarm, as many felt the sarcastic wit in Cox's blog during her time writing for it, particularly during the John Kerry/John Edwards campaign in the 2004 Presidential race, was absent from the chick-lit novel, and that the theme had already been exhausted in wonkette's expose on "Washingtonienne" Jessica Cutler and her blog about D.C.'s sexual trysts.
Cox's novel opens up the question of where the blog fits into the wider world of writing. After all, bloggers are first and foremost writers - should we think of them as restricted to the blogging arena? Whether the blog is hosted by myspace or CNN, it remains a piece of writing that potentially could reach thousands, if not millions, of readers.
Cox's Dog Days was not a commercial success, even though one could argue that wonkette had provided Cox with a ready audience. In fact, a 2004 article on the Washington Post website gave wonkette the honorable mention award for "Best Campaign Dirt" political blog for the duration of the presidential elections. However, whether hugely successful or not, Dog Days proved that a novel can still have, at the core of its plot, the blog. The book's heroine, Melanie's entire personal/career crisis occurs as a direct result of Julie's invention of the promiscuous blogger, Capitolette (the aforementioned, thinly veiled version of Washingtonienne). So what that the book is partially about the impact that the political blog can have? Cox's book still came to its readers as a traditional novel - complete with dust jacket and hard cover, and was published by the Penguin group subdivision, Riverhead Books, which has published books by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Nick Hornby, and Anne Lamott. The book has a close relationship to its author's first publishing venture, the blog. It is divided into chapters that slightly resemble blog entries what with their dated entry openers and excerpts from emails and text messages that hint at the blog's ability to enable links, messages, and comments. Despite this, we can feel free to judge this book by its cover. It is, indeed, a book.
Recently, however, blogs have started a different relationship to the traditional novel. Rather than being part of the plot, or even serve to update the epistolary novel from using letters to using blog entries as its chapters, blogs have started to become novels! To those of us who have a soft spot for the novel - what can be more exhilarating than turning page after page in the middle of the night, wide-eyed in anticipation? - this new trend is disarming. Could this relatively new trend eventually take over the paper novel? Will novels be written in blog entry installments to be read online, much as previously novel chapters were published chapter by chapter in magazines? Here is one blog novelist's testimony about the possibly success this new genre can achieve. Maybe a new acronym will even be invented (if it hasn't already). How about "the novlog"? Personally, I think that no matter how pervasive the Internet becomes, it is unlikely that the novel in print form will lose favor any time soon. The blog is just not suited for the novel.
The blog is meant to introduce one's ideas/opinions/knowledge to an audience who can respond. Though novelists have at times allowed public opinion to sway the outcome of their story, it does not seem likely that serious literature will ever be entirely open to anybody putting in their two cents every time a chapter goes up. Rather, the blog is much more suited for precisely the kind of venture that wonkette.com and dailykos.com aim for - musings on the current political system, current events, and personalities.
WonketteAna Marie Cox founded wonkette in 2003 and left it in 2006 to focus her attentions o
n promoting Dog Days. Cox's website describes her as having "poor people skills," making her unpopular in the mainstream media environment, and having a "sarcasm [that] drove people away." Lucky for her, as wonkette, Cox could indulge her sarcastic nature and not worry about offending anyone. Probably worked in her favor if she did! In fact, her blog was known for sarcasm, sharp with, and a certain lewdness that encouraged talk about D.C.'s dirty deeds. David Lat followed Cox as editor of wonkette.After the publication of "Dog Days," Cox began blogging at her personal website. The site includes biographical information about Cox as well as information about her novel but also includes her off-the-cuff blog entries, written in much the same style as she used at Wonkette.com. She occasionally contributed to Wonkette.com until she joined the staff of Time magazine to contribute a D.C. feature in the magazine and write for Time's blog.
Why We Need the Political BlogWhen I first saw Martin's class title, "Political Fiction," I was a little anxious about the reading list, because for some reason, "political" can sometimes be mistaken for "boring!!" Which is really unfair, since some of my favorite novels are definitely "political" -- 1984, Unbearable Lightness of Being, and others. So why this stigma against the American political novel? Maybe because America's political history has not been, overall, as "exciting" as other countries who produce stimulating political literature. After all, there have been no recent revolutions, no coups, no imperial colonization of the United States. What about the Civil War? one might ask. Truly, American literature had not really come into its own in the 1800s, but Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage showed that an interesting Civil War novel could in fact be written. Is Red Badge a "political novel"? That is a debatable question, but the fact remains that overall, American politics have been not so exciting as to produce what one might expect to be exciting fiction. However, the books we read in Martin's class proved that interesting novels can in fact be written about politics - even the political process, like Advise and Consent.
Politics, however, remains, for the most part, pretty boring. News reporting, transcripts... Even the Starr Report was boring!! The political blog, in this rather boring environ, adds a little spice to the topic. Gossip, mud slinging, name calling, favorites--these are all game on the blog! Even speculation is perfectly acceptable on a blog! And if anal sex and politics can come together (no pun intended) on a political blog like wonkette, then more power to the blog! After all, we roll our eyes when we hear about Edwards' latest haircut on the news, but when it's on a blog we have no problem reading eagerly about the latest sexcapades, mishaps, and blunders that politicians make, sometimes on a daily basis.
A Recent Wonkette Edwards Post (Laughs included)
Americans Want Fictional Democratic President
A shocking new poll shows that America wants a Democrat president — just not Hillary, Obama or Edwards. The reasons are about what you’d expect from the American Voter: Hillary’s a woman of determination, Barry Hussein is black, and John Edwards is a gay lawyer.
“I just think he’s a slick character,” some old retired guy said about Edwards. The old retired guy in question said he wants a Democrat president more than anything — unless Haircut 400 is the nominee, in which case he’ll gladly vote for any Republican.
Hang in there, everybody! Just seventeen more months to go!
Wonkette Toots Its Own HornSince it launched in January 2004, Wonkette has become compulsory reading for Washington, D.C. insiders, political junkies, and a new generation which responds more to humor than the traditional journalistic obsession with process. Wonkette is to political weblogs as Jon Stewart's Daily Show has been to the political shows on television. USA Today describes the title as a "sensation" in Washington, DC. Slate's media critic says it's "sadistic"--but then confesses he's addicted.
Readership. Wonkette continues to grow rapidly. As of November, 2005, it attracted in excess of 2.7 million pageviews per month.
Returning to the political blog
Conservatives and liberals alike in the United States have plenty of options for spending hours on end perusing political blogs, whatever their lasting influence may be. Perhaps the best way to sum up political blogs is to say that they are political fiction meant to inform yet entertain, be an arena where political frustrations can be released and validated, and an alternative to serious political journalism that does not have to be restricted by silly things like formal interviewing/fact checking/no potty mouth standards. It's not that what gets published on a political blog is not true - but what does get published has been constructed like any other fiction - with a specific slant and carefully chosen characters and plot lines to explore.
Just Because It's Too Funny:
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