From today's Wall Street Journal:
How Daschle Got Blogged
And how online journalism is transforming politics.
Monday, December 13, 2004 12:01 a.m. ESTBloggers received a lot of attention for helping to expose the fake documents backing up Dan Rather's "60 Minutes" story on President Bush the Texas Air National Guard. But that's only one of the interesting ways in which the Internet is empowering people and shaping political coverage.
Indeed, the real power of bloggers in politics is how they interact with their mainstream media counterparts. Online journalism gives critics of the media a way to talk back, a platform from which to point out bias, hypocrisy and factual errors. And if the criticisms are on target, old-media institutions can't help but take note. That's exactly what just happened in South Dakota's epic Senate race between Minority Leader Tom Daschle and his GOP challenger, John Thune.
South Dakota Republicans decided that the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, which dominates the state's media since it's the only paper with a statewide circulation, was hopelessly biased in favor of Mr. Daschle. "The ability to use the Internet to circumvent concentrated media power became a 21st-century updating of 19th-century Dakota populism," says John Lauck, a history professor at the University of South Dakota who was allied with Mr. Thune. Mr. Lauck and several of his friends collaborated on blogs that constantly reminded voters of contradictions between Mr. Daschle's voting record and his statements in South Dakota, as well as the Argus Leader's refusal to acknowledge them.
"South Dakotas have for the first time been hearing a few things about 'ole Tom' that have surprised," reported The Wall Street Journal's Kim Strassel from South Dakota last October. "Mr. Daschle has assured voters he supports a state law defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Yet in July he voted against a similar constitutional amendment that two-thirds of South Dakotans support. He was a free trader, but now he's not. He's for legal change, but blocked every tort bill. He beats up on drug companies, though his wife, Linda Daschle, lobbies for them."
Patrick Lalley, the Argus Leader's assistant managing editor, acknowledges that the blogs had an impact on how his paper covered the Senate race. They certainly got under the skin of some of the paper's executives. Randell Beck, executive editor of the Argus Leader, called some of the bloggers work "crap" and said they represented an organized effort by conservatives to discredit his paper. In July, he explained to readers that "true believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue. If Hitler were alive today, he'd have his own blog."
The blogging of South Dakota began in late 2002, after Mr. Thune lost a Senate race to incumbent Tim Johnson, a Daschle protégé, by 524 votes. Republicans felt that both the campaign and subsequent allegations of voter fraud had been unfairly covered by the mainstream media. Jason Van Beek, a student at the University of South Dakota, launched a site called South Dakota Politics. Mr. Van Beek declared he would monitor the "biased coverage" he detected in the Argus Leader. Indeed, in the spring of 2004, Mr. Van Beek publicized memos he had discovered written in the 1970s that revealed the Democratic connections of David Kranz, the Argus Leader's chief political writer. In the memos, aides to Democratic former senator James Abourezk refer to Mr. Kranz as a "good Democrat" whom their office should use to push stories.
Supporters of the Argus Leader fired back a few weeks later with their own allegations of bias when the Thune campaign began paying Mr. Van Beek and Mr. Lauck to conduct research for the GOP campaign. Through October, Mr. Lauck received $27,000 and Mr. Van Beek received $8,000. Some of the work they did included analyzing a poll taken by the Thune campaign which found that 55% of the state's voters viewed the Argus Leader's coverage as biased. "The difference was that everyone was aware the bloggers were biased, while the Argus Leader pretended otherwise," says Paul Erickson, a Republican activist who helped publish and distribute an unfavorable paperback on Mr. Daschle that helped shape public opinion.
The blogs and other alternative media outlets became the tail wagging the media dog. "Argus Leader reporters said the pressure from the blogs increased until a 'siege mentality' took over at the paper, according to one source. Complaints flooded the paper's office," National Journal's John Stanton reported.
The paper's readers also began to take notice of the range of coverage available on the blogs that mysteriously didn't show up in their local paper. "The Argus Leader often doesn't present the whole picture in its political coverage," Wendy Otheim, a teacher from Hartford, S.D., wrote the paper in October. "A multitude of blog sites make for interesting reading. Don't be held a captive audience to the Argus Leader." To its credit, the paper ran Ms. Otheim's letter.
Blogs are likely to pop up in other races, especially in states where media coverage of politics tends to be dominated by only one or two major sources. "I know people in Minnesota noticed the Daschle-Thune blogs, " Steve Sviggum, Minnesota's Republican House speaker, told me. "I would hope bloggers will be all over the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 2006," he added, referring to the state's largest daily paper.
Indeed, a blog called Dayton v, Kennedy has already started up, anticipating a face-off between Sen. Mark Dayton, a Democratic freshman, and Rep. Mark Kennedy, a Republican. Much of its early coverage has focused on Mr. Dayton's bizarre decision to close his Senate office for a month in October, allegedly because of an unspecified threat of terrorism. No other member of Congress took a similar step.
It's clear that political candidates will continue to cultivate bloggers and their readers. John Kerry sent the first word of his selection of John Edwards as his running mate to readers of his official campaign blog. President Bush's campaign responded with a campaign ad on its Web site featuring an endorsement by Sen. John McCain, whom Kerry had pitched to consider a spot on his ticket.
Technology is moving so fast that there are now a growing number of video bloggers, or "vloggers," who look toward the day when they can produce original programming, bypassing the usual broadcast networks and cable channels. Dan Rather may have done more than legitimize the blogging community with his scandal. He may have helped accelerate a radical decentralization of media power that will turn bloggers into future anchors of their own mini-news programs.
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