Last spring, when I attended a panel related to blogging at the National Press Club in Washington, one thing I noticed was that all the panelists (except for the rather pathetic James Guckert/Jeff Gannon) were "connected." That is, they were either married to media people, the children of media people, and/or were graduates of Harvard. Yet they were seen by the Press Club as adequate representatives of the blogging world. The Press Club probably couldn't imagine that bloggers weren't angling to be part of their world, anyway, so why not use people already there?
To each of these people on the panel, then, blogging is simply one new aspect to a media career. They are on TV shows, write newspaper columns, speak on the radio. They all seek media stardom and the nirvana of $20,000 speaker fees.
And not a one understands that others of us who write for the blogs might actually have other goals. So, they see us as competition and call us amateurs.
After all, according to their way of looking at things, what other goal could there be? To be rich and famous, with people hanging on every word--what could be better than that? When someone claims they want something else, these people scoff. Yeah, right: You just claim to want that because you can't make it in the media. Then they point to Markos and other bloggers who have made inroads into the traditional media, using them as examples of what the rest of us would be, if we could.
Their universe, with Washington the sun, New York, the earth and Los Angeles the moon (London and Tokyo distant planets), is the only one they can picture. That anyone could see things differently is beyond their feeble imaginations. If you didn't go to Harvard or Brown, you can't count for much really--or wouldn't you have been at an elite school?
These people see the blog movement as a rabble of outsiders trying to get in. They try to control it by taking a part of it "inside" and by "letting" their own commentators define it. They, after all, are the media professionals, the ones who really "know." They are the kings of the mountain; we are merely strivers trying to get close enough to push them off.
In their view of things.
What they cannot conceive is that few of us are interested in competing with them at all. When we get our short moments of bliss from reaching the Recommended list here at dKos, however, it's not because we see that as a step towards media stardom. Our elation comes from having struck a chord, from having sparked a discussion--from having connected, in one way or another, with other people.
Most of us don't know or care who another knows or where any of us went to college--or even if we went at all. Nor are we impressed that someone recorded a commentary that was aired on NPR. What we look for is the ability to contribute to the conversation going on now. The conversation we are participating in, not the spewing we are supposed to passively accept.
John Edwards, when he talks of `two worlds,' is speaking of worlds dominated by questions of financial security--but the two worlds spreads much beyond that. Most of us are part of a world that the media have failed, a world that has turned from the "newspapers babbling but nothing was said" (as Richard Farina put it long ago) to a conversation where there might actually be a chance for substance.
Let me repeat: For those of us living outside of the self-created media universe, American media have failed us. Yet the reporters, producers, media personalities, writers, and the rest still believe they have something to offer the rest of us, the benefit of their "experience" and "training." Their resumes, in their eyes, should keep them at the center of even a changing media universe, even of one that is leaving them behind.
So, they continue to hire each other, perpetuating their failure by placing faith in `track records' that are nothing more than sorry tales of high-profile train wrecks. It reminds me of the jokes we would make when I was in Peace Corps about many of the professional aid workers. They were judged by the dollar value of the projects they had administered (the more money involved, the higher the profile), not by the success or failure of the projects. The landscape was littered with the remains of development projects that had been good for someone's career and little else.
It's much the same today, in much of the media.
Yet, as I've said, these people think they are somehow worth listening to. On what basis? It's simple: Like those development workers, they have dealt with huge amounts of money, more than most of us can even dream of. In their eyes, that makes their words significant.
Money, however, is not our motivator, no more than media fame is. Sure, few of us would turn down either money or fame, but we blog for other reasons completely--and this is what the media people just don't get, and never will.
One day, I hope--and that day is nearer than even the media elite fear (in many ways, it is here already)--we won't have to worry about these people at all. Each of us will create our own media universe, connecting only to those we decide provides value in our personal lives and not because some media mogul has decided what it is we want. Some day soon, there will be no Ann Coulter with a widely-recognized name, no Bill O'Reilly foisted on an unwilling and (for the most part) uninterested populace (his may be Fox's most popular show--but how many watch him, really, out of the entire population, even as it is?). The media elite will sink back to the level of the rest of us.
The media elite are fighting to keep this from happening, to keep their names front and center (why do you think the Huffington Post exists?). To keep the money rolling in. But, you know what? They are beginning to realize just how little the rest of us care about them.
And that is scaring them.
They need us, even if they did fail to lead us.