TPM Cafe, And Blogs More Generally

by hilzoy

Today, Josh Marshall opened his new site, TPM Cafe. It is really, really interesting. Thus far, I particularly like America Abroad, the foreign policy section, and John Edwards' guest blog, as well as the main "Coffee House" section. (Note: in this section, a lot of the posters are commenting on one another's posts, so it helps to start at the beginning. To do this, go down to the bottom of the page and click what it confusingly called "Next n", where n is the number of posts you choose to display when you sign up. Likewise, 'previous n' gets you back to the later posts.) Good stuff which should finally lay to rest the right-wing claim that Democrats have no ideas.

I think TPM cafe is interesting in a way that goes beyond the interest of its various posts, though; and to explain why, I'm going to have to back up and say a few things about what I think of blogs in general. I am normally skeptical of claims that blogs are revolutionizing this or that. I love them, of course; and I particularly love the fact that they let anyone at all write commentary on whatever they like, and acquire an audience through the simple fact of having something interesting to say. Blogs let me know about all sorts of interesting things I would otherwise have missed, and they provide interesting commentary and insight that otherwise wouldn't exist at all. But this, while wonderful, is not (to my mind) enough to warrant all the breathless rhetoric about blogs that I periodically read.

But there is one thing that blogs can do that I think is as important as allowing everyone who has a computer to join a huge ongoing conversation, but that is not generally remarked on, and it has to do with rectifying what I see as huge informational gaps in the world of most citizens.

The first gap is that most of us do not really know the various figures who make policy: their characters, their reputations, and their history in whatever organization they're a part of. In any normal organization -- think of your own workplace -- this information is crucial. You absolutely need to know who is a pompous airbag, who is understated but shrewd, who you can count on and who you can't, who has a history of bad judgment, and who consistently gets the hard calls right. To understand what goes on in the organization you work for without this knowledge -- understanding it simply on the basis of statements like "X favors this option, Y favors that one", without any understanding of what sorts of people X and Y are, or what their history is -- would be very difficult; even if you succeeded to some extent, there would be whole dimensions that you would necessarily miss. But that's what most of us have to do in the case of our government.

For various reasons, I have sometimes had occasion to meet people who are involved with making policy on social occasions: for instance, at dinner parties. Some of these people are new to me, but some I know and trust. (Note: I don't blog anything I hear at such occasions. Note 2: it would be a mistake to assume that all the people I run into are liberals and/or Democrats.) Listening to those I trust, I get access to the sort of view of government that I've been talking about: the sort that includes the kind of information we all have about our bosses and co-workers, and generally lack about political and government officials. And it has always been, for me, an invaluable part of the background against which I make political judgments.

But I am, in this (and other) respects, incredibly lucky. Most people have no way of knowing any of these things about their elected officials, cabinet secretaries, civil servants, and the like. And the reason we don't know this is not just that most politicians have large staffs devoted to making them look good, whether or not they deserve to. It's that there are very few people whom we know and trust who can tell us these things. Journalists who cover Washington presumably do know this sort of thing, but for fairly obvious reasons don't usually write about it. Imagine a story including the sentence: "Of course, Senator X is well known as a blowhard and an opportunist who is more than willing to bend the facts when it suits his purposes, so the fact that he is making these claims means next to nothing." That sentence might be not just true, but acknowledged by virtually everyone who knows Senator X, regardless of party. Nonetheless, sentences like it do not normally appear in newspapers. If they did, the members of Senator X's party would promptly attack the paper and say that it was biassed; and there would be no obvious way to prove them wrong.

(For the record: I had my own reasons for thinking that John Bolton should not be our UN Ambassador, but it also seemed obvious to me that a significant chunk of the opposition to him came from people who knew him and his record in the way I've been describing; who thought, on that basis, that he would be a disaster at the UN; and who were working against him behind the scenes. It also seemed obvious to me that whatever the motivations of any particular person who opposed him, the opposition to his nomination in general could not have been partisan: had it been, it would not have gotten any traction among Republicans, and thus it would have gone nowhere. Had I supported Bolton's nomination, this would have given me pause.)

A second gap concerns experts. Here the problem is not, as in the previous case, that people aren't willing to say what they know; it's that there are too many self-proclaimed experts, with what look like credentials, saying too many contradictory things. (For the record, I think that there is a special place in hell reserved for those who, having received the training required to count as, or at least look like, an expert in some area, abuse their expertise and bring the word of experts generally into question. Those scientists who allow themselves to be bought by tobacco companies or groups with a vested interest in denying the existence of global warming, for instance. I don't think anyone should trust experts "just because they say so", but I do think that since informed citizenship these days requires information on more subjects than any one human being can master, we need to find some people whose views we can trust on some issues, and those who make it more difficult for us to do so violate a civic duty.)

Again, I'm lucky here: I'm an academic, and so I interact a lot with people who are genuine experts on a lot of issues. I can figure out which ones to trust, and when I encounter an argument that I'm not competent to assess, I usually know a good person to turn to for advice. But, also again, I am completely atypical in this respect. And when I try to imagine being with respect to all issues in the position I'm in with respect to subjects I am clueless about and have no one to turn to on -- military strategy, for instance -- and then trying to figure out how to make sense of conflicting opinions about them, it's a daunting thought. (That's one of the reasons why I do what I think of as my infoposts -- the ones in which I try to explain something clearly, and provide most of the relevant links.)

In both cases, what we need, it seems to me, are trusted intermediaries: people who know either the character of politicians and government officials, or the experts in a given field, and who we trust to be straight with us. And this, I think, is where bloggers come in.

I'm not entirely sure why it seems so much easier to trust some bloggers than to trust, say, columnists in newspapers. (And by "trust", I don't mean "trust to get everything right, including the analysis." I mean: trust to make every effort to get the facts right; to correct oneself when one gets them wrong; not to misrepresent things for partisan reasons; to distinguish between facts and opinion; and generally to play it straight.) Partly, I think, it has to do with the informality of the medium: when I read columnists or political analysts in newspapers, I can almost hear them clearing their throats before beginning to Pronounce on Matters of Great Weight, whereas with many bloggers, what you get is something much more like a cleaned-up, thought-through version of their actual thoughts in their actual voices. Partly it's because it's easier to keep track of the times bloggers get things right or wrong: the major bloggers comment more often than columnists, what they write is more conveniently accessible in one place, and many of them have commenters who keep them honest. (And you can also tell a lot about a blogger by how s/he reacts to those comments.) Generally, though, blogging is more like a conversation than other forms of political analysis, and as a result we can use some of the skills we normally use to judge the credibility of people we talk to.

There are a lot of bloggers whom I do not trust at all, based on my reading of them. (If Hindrocket posted in favor of something entirely uncontroversial, like the laws of arithmetic, I would be tempted to stop for a minute and make sure that 2+2 does, in fact, equal 4.) There are a lot of bloggers about whom my motto is: Trust, but verify. There are some whom I trust, but who do not have access to the sorts of information I mentioned above; there are lots of other great reasons to read their blogs, but they don't have the ability to help with this particular problem. The number of bloggers whom I trust who do have access to that sort of information is much smaller, and Josh Marshall is one of them. Whether or not you agree with his analysis and opinion, he is not often wrong on the facts, and as far as I can tell he is extremely trustworthy. He seems to know a lot of people in DC and in the various expert policy communities, which puts him in a position to provide some of the information I just discussed, information that we, as citizens, badly need if we are to make good decisions.

Now he has put together a site involving both people from the world of DC -- including a bunch of the other DC bloggers whom I trust, like Steve Clemons and Mark Schmitt -- and policy experts (obviously, these two groups overlap.) Their work (at least, the work of those who didn't already have blogs) will instantly become much more accessible to us. We will have an opportunity to figure out for ourselves whether or not to trust them. If we do, they can help us navigate the worlds of DC and policy in ways we would have a much harder time doing on our own. Moreover, they will all be asking one another questions, and responding to each other's posts, which will be fascinating. And, best of all, we get to ask them questions as well. In this way, we will be able to learn a lot of things we badly need to know, and to assess what we learn in ways we could never assess, for instance, a newspaper editorial or a long piece in the New Yorker. I think Josh is performing a huge public service, and I wish him every success.

Comments

[hilzoy]

Just to add one point: I want to make it really clear that this was not meant to be a pro-insider or pro-expert post. In my experience, insiders and experts have roughly the same proportion of jerks as the rest of the population. The point was just that both groups have knowledge that we need, knowledge about how to assess people in the communities of which they are a part; that we sometimes need trusted intermediaries to help us do this; and that because blogs do allow ordinary people to make informed judgments about the trustworthiness of bloggers, trustworthy bloggers can play this role. I think Josh Marshall is trustworthy, and I think TPM Cafe is a huge step towards doing this, in a way that will, among other things, allow us to assess the trustworthiness (or lack thereof) of the various people he's enlisted.

[Dantheman]

I'm not too crazy about the Coffee House, which is too self-referential to me. It hasn't yet reached the asinine level of The Corner as yet, but wait until the commentors get past the newness of it and run out of things to say.

I like most of the other segments, and once again found myself wishing that my primary vote for John Edwards hadn't been too late to help him win the nomination last year.

[mike p]

"I think that there is a special place in hell reserved for those who, having received the training required to count as, or at least look like, an expert in some area, abuse their expertise and bring the word of experts generally into question. Those scientists who allow themselves to be bought by tobacco companies or opponents of global warming, for instance."

Interesting post overall, and I'll check out TPM Cafe when I more have time later tonight, but you might want to clean up that above sentence some. It could be read that you want scientists opposed to global warming to burn in hell. But I think I know what you meant. ;)

[hilzoy]

eek! you're right!

[Gary Farber]

This seems as semi-appropriate as any of the ongoing threads to digressively note that I hope everyone has heard that W. Mark Felt has outed himself as "Deep Throat" and Bob Woodward has confirmed it.

[bob mcmanus]

It is too soon to comment on the new TPM, I haven't really visited it yet. With 116 blogs in my RSS feed, adding another ten (in quantity of material) is daunting.

Marshall has set up a pro- or semi-pro operation, I am quite impressed with the roster.
Will Kos be now required to sign some stars like Daalder?
The evolution of the blogosphere will be interesting.

In matters of fact, I do trust Marshall and Schmitt etc.
In matters of judgement and opinion and analysis, I trust no-one. Everyone in the blogosphere does indeed have a bias and perspective and especially an agenda.

The problem I have with the Daalders and Marshalls and Yglesiases, in descending order, is that they are so frigging careful. As people rise toward the top of the expert/pundit/journalist heirarchy, the cost of a factual mistake or an offensive comment or a hurried analysis or bad prediction becomes higher than the value of enlightening their audience. So I stopped watching Nightline, cause Koppel would want Colin Powell, who would never say anything useful or interesting.