I've avoided all of the Russert diaries, pro, con, and in between, this weekend -- until this morning, when I read the two diaries currently on the Rec List asking Kossacks to cool it on criticizing Russert for a while.
I can see the diarists' point. I can also see the point of those who would like to engage in a clear-eyed discussion of the man before the hagiography (or the vitriol) becomes the accepted biography. Unfortunately, those people mainly seem to be talking past each other, rather than to each other -- probably because to truly engage each other would risk having to admit not being 100% in the right (oh noes!).
There are a few people who are thinking that all this foofaraw will hurt, perhaps even destroy, Daily Kos. I doubt this: DKos has had eruptions like this all the time. Follow me past the jump for more.
Here are a couple of the past hoo-has that generated a flood of GBCWs and were supposed to have Killed Daily Kos Dead, but somehow didn't. Old-timers, please jump in with those that I've missed:
- The Great Primary HR Wars, which started around the time Obama won the Iowa caucuses and actually led to a schism of sorts, were probably the worst so far -- when a former Kossack actually goes on FOX News to attack Markos and now hangs out at No Quarter, you know things have got pretty heated -- but the site survived that just fine.
But there's a reason that I've qualified my remarks here with a "probably": Because I remember this little ditty --
- The Pie Wars of 2005. Wondering why pies are referenced so often here? These are why.
The Pie Wars started in early June of 2005, when TBS ran sidebar ads on Daily Kos promoting a "reality TV" show called "The Real Gilligan's Island". The ads featured a Ginger look-alike and a Mary Ann look-alike, both in bikinis, having a pie fight. I personally wasn't offended -- about the only thing I would have changed would have been to see the Professor (who I always thought was a hottie) and that one blond surfer guy who guest-starred on the original show as a Tarzan type stripped to their swim trunks doing same -- but a whole passel of people were. They made their anger known to Kos, and Kos responded. Unfortunately, his initial response came off as dismissive and insulting, and the super-heated reaction to that led to a mass exodus of feminists, female and male, from Daily Kos. This, of course, caused various right-wing bloggers to rejoice in what they thought (or at least hoped) would be the downfall of the site that had recently overtaken the biggest right-wing sites to be the most-visited political blog.
So what happened? Did Daily Kos die? Um, no. In fact, three months later, Chris Bowers did a post showing that Daily Kos's readership had grown to the point where it was bigger than that of the entire conservative blogosphere, getting so many page hits that it was outstripping SiteMeter's ability to count them all. (And as a look at SiteMeter's current Kos stats shows, the traffic since January has well exceeded even that.)
If Daily Kos managed to survive -- and in fact thrive -- in the wake of these two events, then a weekend's worth of dueling diaries isn't going to hurt it at all.
And again, this is a reminder to those people who don't like a particular diary or diaries: Go find a diary on a topic you DO like, and recommend that. As has been pointed out, it's really sad to see lots of worthwhile diaries slide down into oblivion while the Meta Warriors keep shouting past one another. (Which means that I'm going to take my own advice now and find a worthy diary or eight that is dire danger of oblivion. Catch you all later!)