Bloggers Are the Sizzle, Not the Steak

The Democrats and the Republicans are inviting a limited number of bloggers -- those witty, candid, irreverent, passionate, shrewd and outrageous Internet chroniclers -- to their 2004 conventions. It's a gesture of respect for the growing influence of the blogosphere, and if ever there were events ideally suited to bloggers, the heavily scripted and tensionless conventions top the list.

But make no mistake, this moment of blogging legitimization -- and temporary press credentials -- doesn't turn bloggers into journalists.

Political conventions have become festivals of faux harmony and candidate image-building, which makes them marvelous targets for blogging's candor, intelligence and righteous wrath.

However, bloggers, with few exceptions, don't add reporting to the personal views they post online, and they see journalism as bound by norms and standards that they reject. That encourages these common attributes of the blogosphere: vulgarity, scorching insults, bitter denunciations, one-sided arguments, erroneous assertions and the array of qualities that might be expected from a blustering know-it-all in a bar.

Both parties will have spent millions on their conventions in order to make their best case to the American people, and they hope that the mainstream media will simply turn on the cameras and step back. One could even make a good argument that at conventions the media should just shut up and get out of the way, so that the message could go out -- for once -- unfiltered and unexamined. Even in this year of high contentiousness, the mainstream media have already announced that there won't be anything like gavel-to-gavel news coverage, and they will probably be gentle in their reporting.

Presumably many Americans, especially young ones, will look for something with more spice and feistiness, which means they may well be looking at blogs and no doubt adding their own kibitzing via the medium's famed interactivity. This can be fun, and it can also be important. It was political bloggers and their fans who insulted and harassed and eventually embarrassed the major media into paying attention to the comments suggesting racism that Mississippi's Sen. Trent Lott made at South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. Media coverage forced Lott's resignation as Republican leader in the Senate, but it was bloggers who badgered the media until they did their job.