Customer Reviews

Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Having devoured Eric Boehlert's previous book, "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for George W. Bush," I wasted no time in buying and reading "Bloggers on the Bus." This seminal book confirms my belief that Boehlert is one of the most incisive and accurate media critics writing today. He is perhaps uniquely well-positioned to document how election coverage has adapted (or not) to a 24/7 news cycle, and to detail what a substantial role bloggers have played in this seismic shift.

Like millions of other news junkies, my reading habits now include a wide variety of political weblogs along with MSM articles and broadcasts. In this book, Boehlert demonstrates that during the 2008 Presidential primary season, the candidates' innovative use of all forms of cybercommunication transformed electoral politics forever. Even before 2008, bloggers who posted video and audio links influenced campaign results, as George Allen learned when his use of a racial epithet at a Virginia campaign stop--recorded and posted online--probably cost him that state's Senate seat in 2006.

Bloggers have made an enormous improvement in the amount and accuracy of information available to the electorate. The ranks of bloggers comprise many of today's savviest and most eloquent writers on electoral politics. It's impossible to think of elections now without, say, pre-YouTube Internet video pioneer John Amato of Crooks & Liars, pollster Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, the communities posting at firedoglake, DailyKos, TalkingPointsMemo, ThinkProgress, and Boehlert's own base at the media watchdog site, Media Matters, to name only a few.

The sheer luxury of space that bloggers enjoy allows their postings to include much more information than in traditional print journalism. Though both media allow embedding links, and to some extent allow readers to comment, bloggers are freer of the space restrictions of newspaper and television coverage, allowing them to include a seemingly limitless amount of detail for anyone to access.

For example, before late August 2008, to non-Alaskans Governor Sarah Palin was known primarily to policy wonks (like me) who were following "Troopergate" and her other ethical irregularities. Once Palin was named John McCain's running mate, readers who wanted to know more--much more--about her encountered bloggers who bore unfamiliar names, such as Shannyn Moore and Andrew Halcro, and sites including The Mudflats, Celtic Diva's Blue Oasis, The Immoral Minority, and PalinDeception, just to name a few. Worth the price of this book alone is "Saradise Lost," Boehlert's chapter on the tireless Alaskan bloggers who detailed the unlacquered history of McCain's surprise choice of running mate.

Boehlert may be among the first to document the enormous impact of the Internet on political reporting, but he certainly won't be the last. This book deserves a wide readership, no matter where your political loyalties lie.

I've been reading the blogs for about ten years now. Have been reading some of them like Glenn Greewald since almost the beginning. This book has a lot of satisfying"inside baseball." For an avid blog reader it's a must. Boehlert provided lots of background on bloggers I take for granted. Good info on all my favorites. I think it would also be interesting for a non (political) blog reader. Boehlert is an engaging writer who tells the story of how progressive/liberal/left wing blogs came to prominence to rival right wing talk radio and significantly affected the 2004 and 2008 elections. There are many interesting stories in the book. One of the most interesting tells how local bloggers vetted Sarah Palin for the rest of the country. Highly recommend.

I congratulate Eric Boehlert on the release of this book and must let everyone know that it's an excellent read. I'm about half way through it and have to say it's quite a compelling look inside the netroots revolution. If you enjoyed Boehlert's last book, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, you'll love his latest.

http://mediamatters.org/getonthebus

I won't have enough space to critique this properly but I'll try to be brief. This book is primarily about the 2008 Democratic Party Primary between a woman and a Black man. The author favors Obama devoting 12 chapters to liberal blogger support for him. Two chapters refer obliquely to the apparent existence of conservative bloggers and Sarah Palin. The last half of the last chapter claims that Obama side-stepped the blogger community and single-handedly rewrote how to use the Internet to raise funds for political campaigns.

The writing style is very much like a blog. Childish, random thoughts jumbled together incoherently. Each new character introduced is supposedly downtrodden and humble yet sentences later we hear that the character has been in politics since age 2, the family has a history of politics extending 10 generations, the character selflessly donated $50K to the cause, and blogged 14 hours a day for months for free. Oh, and lived a Forest Gump-like lifestyle with a dash of illegal behavior that should get them arrested. None apparently had to ever pay bills. Clearly these super humans aren't ordinary or maybe the author lies an awful lot. Dates contradict regularly, names change from page to page. Blogger rankings also rankle since you never know who is reading and if they are residents of America or not. It's difficult to take it all seriously.

In one chapter, Obama doesn't even know what social networking is and has to attempt to buy a Facebook group of 160K users managed by a fan for a year but in a later chapter, he supposedly hired a Facebook founder a year earlier to attract volunteers by creating a Facebook group? Surely a founder would have known how to do this? At the end, there is the claim that Obama ignored the blogging community completely yet supposedly bloggers are the point of the book? If Obama's campaign team did anything remarkable, you won't learn about it in this book except for one sentence describing how much money was obtained from online contributions. Apparently other candidates also used online fundraising yet Obama collected substantially more money. It is odd that blogging rants and conspiracy theories can be described in painstaking detail for months leading up to the primary yet the Obama team's use of the Internet is so opaque. Again one must ask, is this book real journalism?

Most importantly, given that 80% of the book describes blogging activities, why no serious discussion about their impact? 1) Does blogging really matter? ie. If most conversations diverge into flame wars between isolated loners, how seriously can we take this citizen journalism? 2) Why isn't blogging embroiled in lawsuits? ie. multiple examples of character assassination yet no follow through. 3) Do politicians now need to hire security to confiscate cameras and audio recording equipment in order to prevent misrepresentation by citizen journalists more interested in fame than fact? 4) Are blogging web sites for rent? ie. When a blog site owner actively purges dissenting opinions from a site and allows libelous rants to remain, clearly this isn't about coverage of news overlooked by mainstream media. Did the owner sell out to a corporation and now pretends to act as an advocate while secretly pushing the corporation's political spin? 5) When should bloggers be noticed? ie. how many views of the same issue are required before politicians feel as if they must respond? 1M? 10M? Are these views vetted in some way to confirm that they are not faked by software or irrelevant because readers are underage or not registered to vote or do we just count web page hits and hope for the best? 6) How important is any one blogger given that they all work for free and can be easily replaced by a like-minded drone? 7) Does this new form of yellow journalism mean we should stop purchasing news at the supermarket checkout stand or is the Australian's empire in serious trouble?

I don't spend hours each day perusing blogs, so before reading Bloggers on the Bus, I didn't have a real good handle on what bloggers do to influence politics, besides just spewing out copious opinions. This book helped me understand the political bloggers--what motivates them and what they do. And it was an easy read, not a dense political tomb.

I mean that both in the sense of its tone, which has a hurried, tossed-off feel and in the lack of a larger perspective which only distance can provide.

As I write this review we're learning still new revelations about the Nixon White House, and he left office over 35 years ago. This book ends on election night 2008. So it can only be a part of the conversation about the roles which bloggers and such played in that most recent campaign.

It is also depressingly poorly sourced in many places. The author warns against the folly of taking the comments posted at a blog as indicative of that blogger, or bloggers in general. But it seems to me that he does just that.

I have sent an email both to the author and to Simon and Schuster (online customer complaint form at: simonandschuster.net) protesting the outrageous pricing for this book. There is no defensible reason why an electronic, downloadable version of this book needs to cost nearly 15 dollars. I have tagged the book with the "999 boycott" tag and urge anyone who is tempted to purchase this book for the Kindle to do the same.