THERE’S nothing more exciting than watching a new medium mature before your eyes. That’s what’s been happening over the past week in the so-called blogosphere – the cyberworld of personal op-ed pages on the Internet.
These “blogs” have been leading the charge against Trent Lott and his appalling praise of segregationist 1948 presidential candidate Strom Thurmond. If Lott is forced to resign as Senate majority leader, which is devoutly to be wished, credit must go to the blogosphere.
Why? Lott issued his praise of Thurmond exactly a week ago. It didn’t make that big of a stir at first. It wasn’t a major story on the weekend chat shows. It didn’t even merit its own segment on CNN’s “Capital Gang,” the inside-Washington Saturday chat show. (Liberal Mark Shields called it the “outrage of the week,” and conservative Robert Novak responded by saying that Lott “was kidding.”)
But in the blogosphere, the matter was churning away – driven in part by Matt Drudge, who highlighted the story over the weekend. On literally hundreds of blogs, voices were raised in protest at the insensitivity and stupidity of Lott’s words.
Liberal bloggers chortled in delight at what they believed was a Republican leader revealing his true colors as a racist. Right-leaning bloggers reared in horror at the way Lott had instantly compromised conservative arguments on behalf of color-blind policies.
The people who run blogs are called bloggers, and they come in many shapes and sizes.
Some make their living expressing their opinions – like Andrew Sullivan (andrewsullivan.com), Josh Marshall (talkingpointsmemo.com) and David Frum (nationalreview.com/frum /frum-diary.asp). Some publications, like National Review and The American Prospect, have communal blogs on which staffers contribute their immediate thoughts on matters of the day.
But the vast majority of bloggers are individual amateurs, which is to say, they work at other professions but still use the Internet as a forum for self-expression. The acknowledged king of the bloggers, Glenn Reynolds (instapundit.com) is a University of Tennessee law professor.
One of my favorites, Noah Millman, works in financial services in New York (gideonsblog. blogspot.com).
An enterprising leftist blogger named Atrios (atrios.blogspot.com) spent the weekend digging up interesting tidbits about Trent Lott’s home state of Mississippi and its record on the matter of segregation. That included the official 1948 Mississippi Democratic Party sample ballot, which asked residents of the state to vote not for Democratic nominee Harry Truman but rather for Strom Thurmond. A vote for Truman, the sample ballot reads, “means . . . anti-lynching and anti-segregation proposals will become the law of the land and our way of life in the South will be gone forever.”
By Monday morning, the blogosphere had gone ballistic. Most impressive was the fact that conservatives didn’t circle the wagons, claiming that Lott was being mistreated and he’d already apologized and Bill Clinton did worse. Rather, they turned their wagons outward and commenced firing at Lott.
“Lott is truly [Thurmond’s] heir,” wrote Millman. “In a nutshell, that’s why he has to be retired.”
Frum wrote: “Trent Lott did himself and the Republican Party serious damage with an ill-judged remark at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party on Thursday – and the damage is only growing.”
Sullivan: “We may be about to ask thousands of young African-Americans to risk their lives for this country. And the leader of the Senate publicly wishes they were still living under Jim Crow. It’s repulsive.”
The drumbeat that turned this story into a major calamity for Lott, and led directly to President Bush’s welcome disavowal of Lott’s views yesterday, was entirely driven by the Internet blogosphere.
In 1991, a little-known radio talk-show host named Rush Limbaugh picked up on a little-noticed story in Washington, D.C., about how congressmen were using a facility operated by the House of Representatives as a no-interest bank. The mainstream media scoffed for a very long time, but eventually the story became a major scandal with huge repercussions – including the eventual transfer of power in the House from Democrat to Republican.
The story was a key moment in media history as well. It made clear to the world how the near-dead AM band had become a populist communication center for conservative America. Limbaugh became a national celebrity and an ideological hero.
L’affaire Lott has the potential to be the same sort of event for the blogosphere. But if it’s not this moment, rest assured there will be another one very soon.