Joshua Foust of Registan who, as you might recall, wrote a scathing post about the vapidity of blogospheric coverage of the Russia-Georgia conflict has re-stated his complaints at Columbia Journalism Review. He criticizes a broad swathe of bloggers elite and not so elite including Kevin Drum, Glenn Reynolds, SWJ Blog, Tom Barnett, Tigerhawk. The essence of his complaint is that a handful of big bloggers, relying on the same narrow sources, linked back and forth to each other or to a handful of friendly blogs whose authors had little in the way of credentials for making informed commentary.
A good deal of that is part and parcel of the “long tail” character of the blogosphere. Practically all of the traffic goes to a relative handful of bigtime bloggers who through lazinesss or force of habit are inclined to link mostly to each other.
He singles out Outside the Beltway (where, as you might know, I’m an associate blogger) for a little faint praise:
That’s not to say that news aggregation is worthless. James Joyner, of Outside the Beltway, did that early on, and did so admirably, though his analysis—helpfully reminding us that the conflict is a “holdover from the breakup of the Soviet Unionâ€â€”wasn’t particularly noteworthy.
There is a peculiar character to Mr. Foust’s column and it highlights something I’ve complained about before. For example, this paragraph:
Soon after the war started on August 8th, on-the-ground reports were being filed by Russian and Georgian bloggers, some of which were even in English and, thus, required no translation. Yet most large blogs just continued to link to the same sources linking to the same stories based on official statements about the war. Or (just as bad) they linked to omnivorous pundits with little more to offer than stridently uninformed opinions. Where is the value added of such a thing?
However, in his column he fails to link to a single Russian or Georgian blog in English, Russian, or Georgian. He doesn’t even quote one to contrast the insights he found there with what he was reading in the English language political blogosphere.
Bloggers with specialist knowledge could be providing a valuable service by seeking out and linking to posts from blogs that are off the beaten path for readers of English language political blogs or even translating posts or articles from languages with which they’re familiar. That bloggers with such valuable resources would prefer to berate other bloggers for the limitations of the resources they’re using as source material over being such a resource is beyond me.
That’s particularly unfair to Joyner since his job with the Atlantic Council poses some restrictions on the amount of analysis he was comfortable sharing.
I found some of the specialist blogs a bit annoying through this episode. One of them complained that it would read no blog with titles that played on the song “Georgia on my Mind.” Others, more understandably repeated, we don’t know anything. True, but what’s the purpose of blogs if it isn’t to take notice and provide opinion on what we do know. And I’m glad I don’t have to come up with titles all of the time.
My point in this post and reaction at the time was fair enough—why aren’t you contributing to our understanding rather than beating us up about how little we understand?
Thanks for bringing this up!
I actually agree with you on this — my original draft had an entire section highlighting the Russian and Georgian bloggers who were providing front-line dispatches. But CJR had already run a piece a few days before on that very topic, and wanted me to focus on how the “big blogs” were failing to deliver on their oft-stated promise to end-run around big media.
Still, I’m glad to see the conversation still going.
Cheers,
Josh
That’s reassuring, Josh. During the opening days of the crisis I followed the coverage in the online Russian language news media fairly closely as well checking a few English language bloggers that I knew were doing the same thing. I don’t read Georgian so I didn’t check any Georgian language coverage.
I didn’t bother translating any of the commentary but you might have noticed that in my posts on the subject I tried to reserve judgment since I thought it was remarkable how different the world from the respective perspectives of the English and Russian language news media.
Just finished reading the other CJR article you linked to. I’d have like to have seen more links, less prose.
A recurring theme here at The Glittering Eye has been the terrible mismanagement of the U. S.-Russian bilateral relationship by Washington. Not that Moscow has been much better but I vote for the guys in Washington, not those in Russia.
Dave, I read your posts as well, and enjoyed them a lot. I’m still working on being able to write about the blogs who did do a good job of covering the conflict — if I could, you would have been on there anyway. Skepticism was appropriate for this kind of conflict, but the point I was making in that piece was that skepticism was largely absent from the major, opinion-making blogs.
And about US/Russia relations? We’re 100% on the same page.
I read neither Russian nor Georgian, and have found relatively little about the early days of the crisis in print or via Google, despite some effort to look. In fact, following links from here and from those in Joshua Foust’s piece has been my most fruitful foray to date (although this is written from work not home…).
I don’t know if that validate’s Foust’s criticisms, or not. Top-ranked bloggers haven’t been linking to a plethora of diverse, good sources–that are rather hard to locate.
Incidentally, one webby feature of this conflict has been the overwhelmingly pro-Russia, anti-Georgia, anti-American nature of comments at most high-traffic blogs. As a minor sense of their flavor, see the four comments at the CJR piece on blogging cited upthread by Foust. Often, it seems good and obscure links can be found buried within comments, but this time there seemed to be too much chaff for that to work.
The lousy performance of the Georgian military is yet to be explained, in my opinion. There are still too many missing pieces about what happened Aug. 7 through 10.
Joshua and Dave, thanks for the commentary and the links.
I’ve got a terribly politically incorrect explanation: they’re not Indo-Europeans. The Armenians, Indo-Europeans, have the most credible military in the region.
Or their vaunted American training was limited. I haven’t done the math, but the combat casualty rate for Georgians in Iraq appears to be on the low end and anecodotaly, the Georgians appear to have been assigned security details inside the Green Zone. Were they being trained to defend their country or something else?