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News from the Future of Public Media
YearlyKos 2.0: From partisan media to public?
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Aug 15, 2007 at 6:46 PM
The second annual YearlyKos convention took place in early August at Chicago’s sprawling McCormick Place. Named after—but by no means conscribed by—the popular progressive blog DailyKos, the conference demonstrated the increasingly fluid relationship between political and public media projects, and the ever-expanding role that citizens are playing in demanding and shaping media that addresses civic issues.
The language that the conference uses to bill itself reveals the semantic struggles faced by mission-driven media-makers who operate in an open environment. In the program, Gina Cooper, the convention’s executive director, writes:
This gathering brings together people from all walks of life who belong to the Netroots, the US-based (but globally focused and inclusive) non-partisan grassroots community that uses the Internet and blogs as primary tools for expressing viewpoints; building consensus; acting to change the status quo; mobilizing huge numbers of people and informing each other and the world about current events, grassroots actions, networks, meetings, media trends, technological advances, government policy and culture… Our mission is to give citizens the information and resources they need to understand today’s pressing issues and decide for themselves what they want to do about it. And our challenge is to create an intimate space and broad culture where people—where you—can debate policy, question assumptions, disagree respectfully and work toward building consensus for taking action within the traditional institutions of our democracy, while building new ones as well
At first glance, the goals of this conference—along with those of myriad media projects represented at YearlyKos, from rising single-blogger outfits like Majikthise to well-funded and powerful commercial outlets like Time—fit neatly into the Center for Social Media’s working definition of public media. These projects bring together discrete and often overlapping publics to learn about and address larger societal issues. In many cases, they tackle questions of power and access, flaws in U.S. and global political systems, and community responses to both natural and civic disasters. Some directly and transparently mobilize their audiences; others explore the powerful and ongoing transformation of citizens into media-makers and engaged political actors. The blogosphere as imagined by the organizers of YearlyKos (the name of which will be changed to Netroots Nation in ‘08) can be understood as one facet of the U.S. public sphere; the netroots as its active public. The annual gathering makes that public manifest for conference attendees, as well as the wider constituency of Second Life attendees, blog audiences, and readers of the voluminous mainstream and partisan coverage of the event.
Similarly, other blogospheres are being imagined and constituted by their publics, from “milbloggers” (who meet face-to-face at the MilBlog conference) to “mommy bloggers” (many of whom recently attended BlogHer). But for now, in terms of both audience share and rising clout, the progressive bloggers of are winning the popular battle to be crowned as central online arbiters of U.S. political issues.
And yet, ideological questions still set much of the Netroots Nation blogosphere apart from both the commercial journalism establishment and the current affairs programming featured on traditional public broadcast outlets. While individual blogs have matured and deepened tremendously in the past few years, in the aggregate, bloggers can still often be intemperate, openly partisan, and highly critical or mocking. (In fact, this is exactly what draws many readers to them!) While financial and technological tools and networks have emerged among bloggers, there is no blogging “code of ethics,” no professional standards-setting organization. These distinctions illuminate longstanding debates about bias, objectivity, representation, balance and truthtelling in public media.
In the journalism arena, some détente has been achieved. Many in the progressive blogosphere have billed themselves as an antidote to entrenched or embedded mainstream journalism outlets, and last year’s YearlyKos conference featured acrimonious clashes between journalists and bloggers, both onstage and onscreen. This year, however, a number of panels explored possible overlaps and collaborations between bloggers and journalists. Nowadays, they are frequently one and the same. As Salon’s Michael Scherer humorously wrote in response to one YearlyKos panel, “On a monthly basis, I could hold a panel discussion at the National Press Club between blogger Michael Scherer, reporter Michael Scherer and ombudsman Michael Scherer. The transcripts of these discussions would be forwarded to a therapist who would be working to get the human being Michael Scherer out of bed in the morning.”
The appearance of seven Democratic presidential contenders for a debate at YearlyKos provided another strong symbol of the narrowing gap between professional journalists, “A-list” bloggers and engaged citizens. Moderated by New York Times Magazine writer Matt Bai, the debate featured questions posed both by DailyKos blogger McJoan and conference faithfuls. Much like the recent CNN-YouTube debate, audience questions were vetted, in this case by Jeffrey Feldman of Frameshop. Also, as in that debate, the creativity and depth of questions that came from audience members matched or surpassed the questions typically crafted by journalists from mainstream or public media. The response in the room was palpable—audience members cheered, hissed and booed throughout the debate, and at times the atmosphere actually moved the candidates beyond their talking points and into seemingly genuine and unscripted responses. Forums like this represent a markedly different environment than the sober televised debates presided over by august public media personalities that the country has seen in recent years.
The crowd didn’t always respond predictably; the progressive blogosphere is not monolithic, and internal disagreements among its members are a matter of course. But if there’s one value members of the netroots share, it’s a desire for a more authentic and honest political discourse. It is this concern that has raised the mission of the progressive blogosphere beyond partisanship and into the broader realm of public media. It remains to be seen whether this distinction will hold as the country heads into a highly competitive 2008 election.
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