Big media on blogs

Facinating discussion on "Meet the Press" about the impact of blogs and the Internet on politics. Here's some of the discussion:

MR. RUSSERT: He now loves Iowa. One of the things that we will find out is just how truly effective is the Internet in this presidential race? Johns Hopkins University has already been studying it. Look at this: “The Use Of Blogs In The 2004 Presidential Election,” a study by Johns Hopkins University. And now for the computer illiterate crowd, this is a blog. This is Howard Dean’s blog. Here’s Wesley Clark’s blog. Here’s George W. Bush’s blog. And here to help us is Chuck Todd of National Journals Hotline.” What is a blog.

MR. TODD: The actual term itself, by the way, is short for Web log. And, you know, you drop the W and you get the blog. I’ll just describe what Howard Dean’s blog since it’s the one that has the most traction and the most attention. It’s essentially like a digital bulletin board saying, “Hey, look, this is what we’re up to today. This is our message today. These are some of the things we’re doing today.” And then it allows a section to comment about what’s going on during the day. And this is where you find out who the bloggers are. These are these troops of people—Howard Dean, on any given posting, will have 150 to 200 comments per these posting. That means there’s probably about 80 to 100 people at any one time, they’re just chitchatting. It could be that they’re immediately responding to seeing Dean on television or they’re probably blogging right now while they’re watching us talking about them right now. No doubt probably they’re getting mad at us. They’re very anti-media. Reading the Dean blog is like reading Republican message points from years past and they’re anger toward the media. They felt very mad at NBC News and Lisa Myers over the last couple of days over the story, felt like somehow NBC News took his comments out of context. So it is a little...

MR. RUSSERT: Which Lisa Myers did not...

MR. TODD: No, not at all, but it was...

MR. RUSSERT: ...and the Dean campaign will acknowledge that.

MR. TODD: They acknowledge it. They did, but...

MR. RUSSERT: In effect, it’s a cyber-bulletin board.

MR. TODD: Yeah, exactly.

MR. RUSSERT: But now people who don’t like Howard Dean have occasionally gone up there and said some negative things and they are called trolls.

MR. TODD: You love this term, don’t you?

MR. RUSSERT: Correct?

MR. TODD: Yes, it is the term.

MR. RUSSERT: Roger Simon, when I say troll, I think of you.

MR. SIMON: Well, thank you very much.

MR. TODD: You’re a blogger, Simon.

MR. RUSSERT: But you’re a blogger.

MR. SIMON: I am a blogger sort of. I mean, the difference between—look, a true blog is I woke up this morning, I decided to skip chem class, now I want to write about the last episode of “Friends.” That’s what blogs are. You know, it’s people talking to each other. My site is actually written columns. There’s a difference between writing and typing basically. Well, I mean, the theory between blogging is half correct. It’s everybody has an opinion and then the other half is: And everyone else wants to read about it. That’s not necessarily true. When I first put up the site, it got all these responses. I thought people wanted me to respond to them. They don’t. They want to talk to each other. And that has been the power that Dean has tapped into.

MR. BROWNSTEIN: A long time before the Internet, Henry Luce said, “A magazine creates a community of interest that it did not know it existed.” And the blog does something of the same thing, but I think there’s a broader political question here, Tim. If you think of the blog as part of the overall phenomenon of the Internet growing in importance in politics, one question that has to be raised looking at Dean’s success is whether what it takes to succeed on the Internet and to generate this passion is inimical to what it takes to win a general election and to win over a lot of voters who are less passionate. Does it take a message and a persona that is so cutting and polarizing to attract attention on the Internet that you will then have trouble in November winning over the Senate. I mean, in the end, you need 50 million votes or so to win a presidential election and that’s a lot more people than you have at any given moment signing on to your blog.

MR. TODD: Well, building off of Ron’s point, you know, this whole growth of the Internet for Dean support, it was exponential in the summer and in the fall, and you know what? It’s really slowed. This week, you know, they throw up these fund-raising goals and they do it as a bat. It’s like the old Red Cross goals where you see the progress as you go. They had the Sweep The Seven. On February 3, 700,000, Sweep The Seven. You know what? It was one of their slowest fund-raising bats we’d seen. They didn’t allow the goal by midnight Friday to even show up. They changed it. You know, they realized something wasn’t working, they changed it to say, “Thank you, Tom Harkin” and they made it to about 800,000.

MR. RUSSERT: You know, it’s so striking to me. When we had the big Internet bubble and everyone was saying, “The Internet’s the wave of the future and all the brick-and-mortar businesses are in trouble”—and the AOL Time Warner merger and on and on, and suddenly people said, “How do we make money off the Internet?” The question here is: Will the people who use the Internet, and talk to the blogs, will they show up on caucus night? Will they show up to vote? We have not seen it. We do not know. If they do, Howard Dean will win big. Ironically in all this, I was reading New Yorker magazine the other night, and at the end of 2002, Howard Dean himself said, “What’s a blog?”