In Days of Old When Blogs Were Bold...

Apropos of nothing, I thought you all might get a kick out of this 2004 peek over the bloggy horizon as seen now, through the dark glass of 2021.  From the Austin Chronicle, March 2004:

Blogging to Utopia

Are weblogs The New Alternative Press?

When the people at Pyra Labs developed a Web tool in 1999 that allowed the user to create, from any Net connection, a page that could include links, graphics, and text, the news was overshadowed by seemingly bigger Web stories: notably, Napster and the monstrously hyped idea of WebTV...

Interestingly, the blog seems to be resurrecting a form that was invented on March 1, 1711, when Joseph Addison and Richard Steele started The Spectator. The authors called The Spectator a "diurnal essay" – in other words, a daily that covered politics, culture, and lifestyle issues from a personal POV. The current environment in which blogs have flourished is oddly similar to the London landscape of Addison and Steele's time, when England's first stock market bubble coincided with a fad for coffeehouses to produce a constituency for a new, disposable kind of text. The Spectator provided perfect reading matter to bond this community of coffeehouse goers.

What blogs add to Addison and Steele's primitive print format are links and interactivity. Blogs can accommodate comments, which have become the most fascinating parts of some of them. And links allow the reader to segue seamlessly from text to reference – or to another blog – in one reading session.

In a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review from last year, Matt Welch, a blogger and journalist whose chops include being on the original masthead of The Prague Post, the legendary Nineties weekly, contrasted the vitality of blogging with the anemia, as he sees it, of alternative newspapers..."Basically," Welch says, "I think the blogs provide oxygen, allow stories that are on the borderline of newsworthiness to be picked at by interested nonprofessionals, and then if there's enough fire it'll spill into a Drudge, or a James Taranto, or cable news, or a Paul Krugman column."

One of the more fascinating aspects of blogging is the meld between the intellectual life mirrored in dated blog entries and cultural politics. Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor specializing in the Shiite culture...

There is a rapidly increasing number of bloggers who are using the medium to deal with their specialties. Carl Zimmer, the author of Parasite Rex and Soul Made Flesh, writes the Loom, a science blog...

All of this made me smile in the way the faded remains of a pressed flower saved as a memento from some important event from long ago can summon a smile. The possibilities. The utopian  sense of something new arriving in the world that would shake up the staid, stale and deeply compromised mainstream press.  And OMG, remember when blogs had actual comment sections?

Since you're reading this, you know how things turned out.  Political blogs on the Right flourished and became major pillars of the Conservative media machine because they existed in sync with the Right's overall messaging (Government is Evil, the Media is a Liberal cesspool and the Left are terrorist-loving, America-hating Commies) and the Right's massive investment in its own political media ecosystem which now spans radio, television, think tanks, magazines, book publishers, radio networks, Facebook and podcasts.  The Right used blogs as one element of their farm system, as early sounding boards for testing new propaganda, and as tireless media attack dogs.   

For a brief period during the collapse of the Bush Administration the Liberal blogosphere looked like it might be able to make real, permanent inroads into the American media establishment based on its standing as begin just about the only people who had been right about the Bush administration all along, and who had had been relentlessly mocked and slandered for it.  It certainly looked like the ideal moment for some of America's senior pundits and journalists -- who had spent most of the decade loudly leading Dubya's cheerleading squad --

-- to gracefully exit the scene and make room for a new cohort of opinion-havers who hadn't just been been proven to be very publicly and humiliatingly wrong.

But that never happened because no matter how right we were or how ruinously wrong the mainstream media and the Right had proved to be, standing outside the media citadel whamming on its iron gates with our wooden bloggy hammers was never going to be enough.  To make real, lasting change to the ossified, compromised mainstream media we were going to need a battering ram as big and as powerful as Fox News and Conservative Hate Radio.  And since the institutional Left has never shown any interest in making the investments of time, money and talent necessary to build those things, that moment of opportunity quickly passed and we found ourselves once again left to fend for ourselves, with no institutional support, shouting into the abyss as stories of Birth Certificates, Death Panels and the Fake Tea Party swallowed the news cycle whole.

A dynamic which I put to music in my 2019 hit, The Devil and David Brooks.  

And a one and a two...

Now that Mr. David Brooks has successfully scammed the New York Times and PBS and NPR and Yale and NBC and The Aspen Institute and Oprah into underwriting his midlife crisis, and various paeans are being written about his heroic moral journey from unrepentant Beltway Republican hack to unrepentant Beltway Both Siderist hack, I thought someone should set that journey to music.

To be sung to the tune of "The Devil Went Down to Georgia".

Or, I suppose, "The Rains of Castamere"

The devil hopped the Acela express
He was lookin' for a soul to hire
He worked for the Times
And he was way behind
Because Safire was due to retire

When he came upon this goofball
Pimping Bush in The Weekly Standard
And the devil sat down
Right next to this clown
And said, "Boy, you sure can pander

I guess you didn't know it
But I'm a op-ed columnist too
And if you'd care to take a dare, I'll make a bet with you

Now you sling pretty good drivel boy
But give the devil his due
I'll bet a job for life
And a brand new wife
'Cause I think I'm better than you"

The goof said, "My name's David
And it might be luxuriating in a morally exhibitionist display of hubris on stilts on my part
But I'll take your bet
And you're gonna regret
'Cause I'm the hackiest there's ever been!"

David you lather up your prose and sling that drivel hard,
'Cause your party's lost its fucking mind and the wingnuts need a bard

And if you win you get a job-for-life at the good old NYT
But if you lose ... you'll get it anyway!

The devil opened his laptop and he said: "I'll start this sham."
And pablum dripped from his fingertips as he greased up Lindsey Graham
And he puckered up, sat right down and gave Dubya's ass a kiss
Then a band of Neocons joined in and it sounded something like this

When the devil finished, David said: "Well you're pretty good old cobber.
Just sit down in that chair, right there, let me show you how to slobber."

The Right's gone mad, so it must be spun
So that Both Sides Did It and the Centrists won
Get Brooks a gig at the Gray Lady.
"Will he ever tell it straight?"
"Are you kidding me?"

The devil bowed his head because he knew that he'd found his tool
He gave David that job-for-life as the Beltway's holy fool.

David said: "Devil, if you've got a sec, there's just one more small detail.
Unless I'm on Meet the Press a lot, our plans will surely fail."

The Right's gone mad, so it must be spun
So that Both Sides Did It and the Centrists won
Get Brooks a gig at the Gray Lady.
"Will he ever tell it straight?"
"Are you kidding me?"...

But the most perfect early-blogosphere part of the Austin Chronicle article has to be this:  of the three blogs they cite and link to in the article, one of them misdirects you...

...one of them was suspended...

...and one of them hasn't posted since 2006.

Haloscan Lives!