The Newshog Makes A Promise

If you were to ask, I would admit that the bigtime bloggers I have most respect for are Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory, John Arvosis at AmericaBlog and Jon Henke at Q&O. All have very different styles but all have one thing in common - they are nobody's shills. If their own viewpoint, carefully and thoughtfully arrived at, means they have to toss some flak at those who are ostensibly "on their side" then they do so - no problem at all. It is singularly refreshing to see when so many of the A-List bloggers are effectively publicity mouthpieces for their own party or closely related vested interests.

Which is not to say that the mainstream media is any better.

In the main, the opinion columnists write from their own ideological foxholes, well aware that the party they support by their hacktacular columns is providing their bread-and-butter in many ways - insider access, interviews, speaking tours, off-record information. At the same time, too many of the mainstreams opinioneers have made themselves into modern-day versions of Tolkien's Wormtongue - whispering in the ears of power by virtue of associations and think tanks who rarely acknowledge their interconnectedness. There is now an incestuous inter-relation of pundits, lobbyists, experts and decisionmakers - as people like Mike Ledeen and Charles Krauthammer have shown, it is possible to be all four at once.

"Investigative" reporters have in the main become mere stenographers, most especially in the realm of foreign affairs. They rely on their access to "unofficial sources" and "officials speaking anonymously" so much that they are scared to rock the boat and perhaps lose that access. What results is regurgitated government PR which the administration may as well have written themselves. Of course, this way, they don't even have to pay the media to release their propoganda the way they have to in Iraq. Then, of course, we have FOX News and the New York Post...

The mainstreams' cabals of incest were extended into the blogosphere - the supposedly free medium - almost from the beginning, to the point where a huge proportion of political bloggers do nothing more than uncritically echo the bloviatings of those A-List pundits/lobbyists/experts/decisionmakers as they write their own blog posts to reinforce the messages of their associations, think tanks and political parties.

The Fourth Estate, including its bloggie offspring, is failing in a very obvious way, its original envisioning by the Founders as a final check on government and a voice of the people has been usurped. There are precious few, especially among the big names, who are independent of the in-crowds. The real independence is found almost exclusively among smaller creatures in the ecosystem and even there it is rarer on the Right side of the street.

In writing Newshog, I have always hoped that I would stick to my own principles, not those dictated by a party or a think-tank - or worse, a cabal which doesn't even openly acknowledge its own existence to its many readers (look up "Benador Associates" if you don't know what I am talking about here). I'm open about being a Lefty, even a socialist. If you want to get wonky then describe me as a "minimum-socialism libertarian". I believe in the bare minimum of government that can deliver positive freedoms effectively and the absolute minimum of government to ensure (as much as is in accordance with those positive freedoms) that it doesn't interfere with my negative freedom - that is, the freedom to be left alone. I belong to no political party and see benefits and drawbacks to several. I give my support to any political party when it agrees with me, not because I should be loyal to it.

So here's my promise:

I will strive to be as critical of what I do believe in as I am of what I don't believe in and as critical of those who would normally expect my support as those who wouldn't. I will give praise where due but I see my primary task as being a critic - a critic of both government and opposition alike, regardless of whether either feels I should support them. In the same way my task is to be a critic of all those who seek to influence public opinion and the operation of good government to their own agendas and ways of thinking. I will attempt to lay my criticisms out coherently and fairly and I will cite evidence to back my arguments. I will try to inform and to rely on no-one's word without verifying it to the best of my ability.

In other words, I will try to live up to the Founder's expectations of a free and critical press, which I believe they felt was a patriotic and neccessary part of democratic governance, even though many would not consider me or others like me anything to do with the press.

Somebody's got to do it.