A Message for the News-Leader About Blog Pseudonymity
The Springfield News-Leader publishes an editorial today, the gist of which it sums up in a sentence:
"too much of the conversation going on in the "blogosphere" is anonymous, and we want to do our part to put an end to that."
The News-Leader editorial board should understand that there's nothing it can do "to put an end" to blog pseudonymity; people largely don't care what the News-Leader editorial staff thinks. If they did, there'd have been no need for political blogs like FiredUp Missouri to crop up in the first place.
The News-Leader's juvenile notion that its refusal to reprint on its website blogposts written pseudonymously will somehow encourage heretofore anonymous bloggers to sign their work couldn't be more mistaken. No one at FiredUp ever clamored for posts from this site to be cut and pasted --as they frequently were-- onto the News-Leader's website, so I trust that no one will care when that ceases to happen.
There's much to be written about this particular topic, but much has been written already and with great clarity by pseudonymous bloggers like Digby, whose body of writing in the name of "Digby" tells us far more about his credibility than we would get by simply learning his or her "real" name:
a lot of this angst about pseudonymity stems from the discomfort of not knowing which comments they are supposed to take seriously if they don't have information about who is "properly" credentialed and who are common rabble that can safely be ignored. We know that sanctioned political voices, no matter how psychopathically uncivil, can get fawning covers on TIME magazine and raise nary a peep, rich racist radio hosts are treated with utmost respect and loyalty, and lying, rightwing propagandists are given endless opportunities to penetrate the mainstream discourse. But angry pseudonymous readers who cannot be judged on the basis of his or her credentials or social standing are threats to the political health of the nation. It's about class and status, same as it ever was.
I like Marcy Wheeler's observation that many of them can't be bothered to actually read and comprehend the arguments set forth so they depend entirely on authority. And I also think another problem, born of both proximity, habit and deadline pressure, is that many of them come to overly value their personal judgments of people whom they "know." This is a weakness, not a strength, and smart journalists (and bloggers) should work hard to overcome their own heuristic biases rather than rely on them. The sordid revelations in the Libby trial should have been enough to spark a little soul searching on that count.
Of course. It makes perfect sense that an old media outlet like the Springfield News-Leader would like nothing better to know the identity of the author of every bit of political prose or polemic that appears on the internets, because it is mostly on those terms that they regularly make judgments about what things are true/false/acceptable for publication.
With posts written under the names of John Hancock, Roy Temple or whichever, the News-Leader can do reporting in the manner with which it is most comfortable: by writing every political story as an incident of competing claims between known partisan or ideological opponents. With posts written by people of some renown --authors who have longtime ties to institutions with which editors are familiar-- newspapers like the News-Leader are able to easily slide their creators into one of the "he said, she said" slots that animate their reporting.
But pseudonymity makes News-Leader editors mighty uncomfortable, forcing them out of the lamely predictable rut of using an individual's public standing or reputation as a proxy for the quality of his or her political ideas. The press has become notoriously bad, particularly during its nadir in the Bush Administration, about making independent and factual assessments of the truth of specific theories and ideas. Its abhorrence of pseudonymity on the internet is a symptom of that fact. With the media's once-honed skill at seeking and finding factual bases for political hypothese having shrivelled to the point of vestigiality from prolonged disuse, it is left completely unable to assess the validity of ideas of those creators for whom they lack some kind of identity reference point.
Are the ideas of pseudonymous bloggers, qua ideas, worthy of dismissal by virtue of no better reason than that newspaper editors are unable to chart the lineage of their parent? That is the case that the News-Leader is making.
This is terribly sad, and bad for journalism.
Are, for instance, the suggestions of "Winners and Losers" by a blogger at a site called MissouriPolitics.net any more or less valid because we can't identify the author beyond his screen name of MOTO? That post is, if nothing else, full of ideas and judgments that people can agree or disagree about, but which are deserving of real consideration for reasons that have nothing to do with who wrote them. I may disagree with some of the judgments in that post, but it isn't because I don't know who wrote it. In fact, it is entirely possible that if someone told me the name of the person who wrote it I wouldn't even know who that person is. Yet that revelation is supposed to mean something to me about the quality of the ideas the author means to express?
That concept is absurd on its face, but the News-Leader wants me to believe it. Sorry, no.
In some ways, the position of the News-Leader regarding pseudonymity of bloggers is even worse than I've made it seem to this point. As other (non-pseudonymous) bloggers have noted, the introduction by traditional media of "concerns" about blog pseudonymity is, at its core, about denying access to the megaphone to new voices that haven't been "approved" by the mainstream. Ezra Klein wrote:
It's time to call a spade a spade. Grubisich thinks the public square has become too open, and he wants to erect some new barriers to entry. That's what the pseudonymity discussions are always about: Privileged members of the media feeling great anxiety that they're no longer set apart simply by access to microphones and looking for ways to keep the barbarians off the stage. But whatever, I'm willing to meet them halfway. I'll start running background checks on my readers if Grubisich and his colleagues consents to some symmetrical constraints: If they write something stupid, inflammatory, or wrong, they will lose their jobs. If what you want is for new entrants to the public sphere to feel more vulnerable when participating, it's only fair that you do the same.
As Klein says, concerns about anonymity/pseudonymity are often self-protective; they are born of the fear that some newcomers will steal a spot on the soapbox that they've worked so hard to "earn." Once-pseudonymous blogger Atrios puts an even finer point on the mechanisms that "concerned" mainstream media want to use to enforce their bias against pseudonymous ideas:
as Ezra suggests, the club that they want to use is the "consequences," which for most of us is about having current or future employment prospects threatened because someone googles our names and discovers that we don't like George Bush enough, or we hate her favorite rock band, or some other reason. This, of course, is a barrier too high for plenty of people. Which is the point.
The main idea here being that some in the traditional media, like the News-Leader editorial board, believe that people with political ideas ought to have to put some part of their personal lives at risk in order for their writing to receive a public airing. Besides being anti-democratic and anti-American, this unnatural restriction cheapens the dialogue by slanting the playing field in favor of the ideological or partisan interests who have the most money and resources to spend on moving their message.
John Hancock at MissouriPulse, or any of the bloggers at Rex Sinquefield's ShowMe Daily, are completely unconstrained from the need for pseudonymity because their employment prospects are not risked by virtue of their blogging. Quite the contrary, Hancock is paid quite handsomely by the Republican Party for writing at his blog. And Sinquefield's bloggers are similarly compensated, as blogging is apparently a part of their duties as fellows at his institute. No one has ever paid someone to write at FiredUp Missouri.
So why should the good people who volunteer their time to express views and interpret events on FiredUp face the possibility of angering their employers, alienating their clients or softening their critiques because some nose-in-the-air newspaper editor wants to know who is writing what he's reading on the internet? Why should they open themselves to the sorts of personal retribution in which certain Republican operatives specialize so they can express their opinion about the sorry state of Missouri government?
They shouldn't have to do any of those things. So long as they are expressing ideas that conform to the common rules of logic and accepted fact, they shouldn't stop simply because Tony Messenger (or anyone else) wants to check to see if they belong to the cool kids club, which gives them license to make public statements about politics in our state.
As a final assertion and challenge, I'd ask the News-Leader editorial board and anyone else who has such great "concern" about pseudonymity in the blogosphere to take a moment and re-examine what pseudonymity really is. One of the wonderful things about blogs is that they create an accessible historical record that anyone can use to see what bloggers were saying long ago. At FiredUp, one can go back and see what posters here were writing more than two years ago. This also allows people like the News-Leader editors to go back and get a feel for who pseudonymous posters really are --if not actually find their "real" names-- by mulling through the history of their writing.
I'd suggest that an archive of the written thoughts and suggestions of pseudonymous posters like Cole, Jefferson Thomas, Thomas Charles, J.Carter, Howard Beale, Hinnus_Asinus, etc. would provide to readers far more insight and meaning about those people than would simply knwoing the name that is on their driver's licenses. It is, after all, ideas that blogs are supposed to be about.
The folks who started this community blog, so far as I know, didn't do so in order to reinforce the artificial hierarchy of "approved" commenters and pundits which the mainstream media has worked for decades to create. Rather they saw a need for an outlet for ideas that weren't being adequately expressed --perhaps because there were significant cultural and social barriers to their expression. For the News-Leader to try now to force compliance with the same antiquated media mores indicates that they still don't understand why newspapers are a dying enterprise.
Editorial boards are not the keepers of what is properly the political media community but, like pseudonymous bloggers, are merely participants in it. Perhaps if the News-Leader spent more time generating its own new ideas rather than trying to tamp down those of others it could ensure its own relevance through the new media revolution. Big name or no name, nothing --not even a big media megaphone-- is guaranteed forever.
