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As an old-school blogospheric "scalp hunter," I agree with the principle behind Rick Moran's post:

This medium, we have to keep reminding ourselves, is still fairly new. And as more and more people enter the blog universe - many looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - it is inevitable that they too, wish to get in on the fun of scalp hunting. One way to climb up the winding stairs to the top of the ziggurat is to outshout your competitors while attaching more importance to a story than it deserves. This will get you traffic, links, and the admiration of your fellow bloggers.

I understand the game. I've played it for three years, shamelessly piling on and then shooting off emails to big bloggers hoping they would find my insightful, pithy comments about the swarm du jour good enough to link. There's nothing inherently dishonest in this method of self-promotion - unless what you write isn't what you truly feel in which case you won't last long anyway. But I truly believe now that blogs have to move beyond this phase. To what end, I have no idea. I couldn’t have foreseen where blogs are now 3 years ago when I started so my powers of prognostication when it comes to blogging and internet media are practically nil.

I only know a growing sense of unease elicited by the notion that by overhyping stories like the Beauchamp caper, the credibility of the medium suffers. For that reason alone, it may be time to put down the blood stained hatchets and begin to seriously examine just what we should be doing that will increase our influence rather than make us look like a bunch of one dimensional attack dogs.

I think that the Beauchamp story is worthy, primarily based on the determination of whether the New Republic was taken by a dishonest contributor (again). Those rating the story meaningless forget that professional journalism is structurally inclined to hold itself to a high standard when falsehoods or egregious errors are uncovered, not to mention the fact that the last episode of fabulism at the New Republic merited a movie based on the event. Beauchamp's literary misdeeds aren't as extensive as those of Stephen Glass, but they're certainly important if you care about standards in journalism. It's a profession where credibility is the currency.

But Moran's point about overenthusiastic scalp-hunting remains. And somewhat related is that, as this story was hashed out in the blogosphere, more subjective arguments have seamlessly intermingled with fact-checking the claims, from "it's a right-wing distraction from the war," to "it's a left-wing bid to undermine the military," to even commenting or speculating on the sexuality of Beauchamp and one of his investigators. I have a lot more sympathy for some of these arguments than others, but they can become binding distractions when dominating a given author's analysis of whether the claims published by TNR were true or not. Opponents zero in on and refute the more wildly subjective points with wildly subjective points of their own, and the meat of the matter can be lost in the swirl.

Individual "truths" are forged, the narrative is consigned to binary partisanship in the minds of many and it's a painful, messy spectacle. But in the end, the truth outs. So I guess it all works, even while the shouting and disproportion might seem to undermine the credibility of the blogging medium as a whole.

I empathize with Moran's desire for an evolution in the blogosphere. I hope future blogospheric fishing expeditions are conducted with due proportion and focus. But these are vain hopes, perhaps coupled with vain worries.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey puts out a good post which highlights a weak part of Moran's piece:

Rick Moran warns the Right that this doesn't mean the war is won in Iraq. I don't think that was the issue at all, though. This blogswarm was born of frustration over what the Right sees as slanted coverage of the Iraq effort. We're not claiming that the war has been won, but we're saying that the media has slanted their coverage to make it appear lost when it isn't. Scott Beauchamp and TNR gave the blogosphere an example of clear journalistic malpractice -- and it pounced, in droves.

UPDATE: Apparently the veracity or fabulism of the TNR pieces remains contested. This sets up a massive plate of crow for either the Weekly Standard or the New Republic.

Posted by Bill at August 7, 2007 11:27 AM | TrackBack (0)