A Farewell To Arms
By Neil Dodds
10 April, 2006
Matt Welch posts a 'farewell to warblogging' as one of his final essays for Reason. In the weeks after 9/11, hundreds of individuals discovered weblogs as a means of discussing their reactions to the terror attacks, resulting in what Welch describes as "an exhilarating whirlwind of grassroots media creation."
Here's Welch back in 2001: “What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not? (...) I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s…a readiness to admit error [and] a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review.”
How did that work out, then?
"Man, was I wrong," writes Welch, five years on.
Warblogs have contributed to an America that is now more partisan than ever. The culture wars - which looked so nineties after 9/11 - are back with a vengeance. Rather than continue the grassroots, nonpartisan direction of the early days of warblogging, bloggers have arranged themselves once again on party-political lines - and the most prominent writers now spend their time sniping at former comrades. Right wing bloggers and their readers, who used to take great pride in fact-checking mainstream reporters, still savage liberal big media hacks - but wave hugely partisan and often incredibly dodgy bloggers on through.
Welch reserves particular venom for Pajamas Media - though partly, it seems, because he imagined that an enterprise that tapped the peculiar energy of the blogs would "create one hell of a newspaper, magazine, website, and/or broadcast company for the New Era." Not so Pajamas, he argues.
Elsewhere, blogs briefly pushed Howard Dean into the lead of the Democrats 2004 presidential nomination and argued that Democrats should block Supreme Court nominations. All far from the nonpartisan media explosion Welch backed in 2001.
There's nothing wrong with organising politically on the web - indeed, one could argue that that's one of the things the web can do best. Out of curiousity your correspondent attended a protest against the round of strikes and school blockades that have gripped France in the past month. The group behind the anti-strike protest, which claims it represents a silent majority in the country, gets very little media coverage - and next to none in comparison with trade union leaders and pro-strike students.
The biggest cheer of the day came when one speaker claimed that they couldn't have organised the rally without the internet, which he described as "the only truly free media in France."
In fact, it's probably inevitable that blogs would split along partisan lines. The unity after 9/11 was always going to be short-lived: After all, veteran cultural warrior Susan Sontag published an essay that argued that the US pretty much deserved it mere days after the attacks. Hers was only the first of many.
Additionally, the initial US reaction to the World Trade Centre attacks was uncontroversial (to all but a few Americans). The US patiently gathered UN and international support for its invasion of Afghanistan - events since November 2001, not least the invasion of Iraq, have not enjoyed such cross party or international support. One can hardly expect a nation to experience a conflict as divisive as the Iraq invasion without that division being reflected in the media.
In 2001, there weren't that many warbloggers, and those there were were drawn from similar ranks: Vaguely liberal, early adopter and often tech-friendly writers who might not have felt immediately drawn to George W Bush, but who argued that their untested new president deserved the benefit of the doubt, especially faced with such an aggressive threat.
One could also argue that the blogs in those days reflected America. Directly after the 9/11 attacks, George Bush enjoyed one of the highest approval ratings in US history. If warbloggers were a true cross-section of grassroots America, a lot of nonpartisan support for the president would only be expected.
Perhaps - again, understandably - Welch mourns the end of nonpartisan America more than the demise of the warblogs.
Now there are more bloggers, there are bound to be many more from outside that mould. There are dyed in the wool leftist bloggers, right-wing Christian bloggers, bloggers who advocate bombing Mecca as well as bloggers who argue, like Sontag, that the US had it coming. Even the terrorists use blogs these days. In fact, if you look hard enough, you could probably still find the kind of nonpartisan, grass-roots bloggers that Welch advocates.
Blogging has also outgrown the war. Initially, like so much else on the internet, it was a tech tool. Then the warbloggers grabbed this new means of communicating and reacting instantly. Five years later, there are blogs for every subject under the sun. Long term projects like Instapundit share the blogosphere with blogs set up to discuss local news, a single newspaper column, or to follow the short life of the whale that found itself swimming up the Thames earlier this year.
Political blogs make up only a tiny percent of the number of blogs out there. The brief moment of nonpartisan new media that followed the 9/11 attacks has been and gone.
If anything, some warbloggers have become the news media's attack dogs, playing a role similar to that of talk radio hosts or populist newspaper columnists. Others provide a more considered approach to the news, utilising the internet's discursive opportunities to create a commentary that goes into more depth than anything available in the newspapers.
Welch now works on the opinion pages of the LA Times - one of the bad guys of big media that warbloggers used to get so upset about. Correspondent.com wishes him all the best, but hopes that when he gets the time to work on his Blog, he finds something to write about other than baseball.
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