Interesting exchange this weekend which we might title, “Why can’t conservative bloggers report?”
It starts with Matthew Yglesias responding to a Michael Goldfarb item about Greg Sargent leaving Talking Points Memo for a new Washington Post website. Goldfarb says the GOP has no equivalent to TPM — no website with a cadre of muckrakers. Yglesias responds:
What the right lacks are people with the skill to do the job. The one time I can recall the conservosphere leading the charge on a legitimate story, the thing with Dan Rather and the national guard memos, they got tons of traffic and attention. And lord knows the conservative media has lots of money and plenty of staff. But almost none of that stuff is going to people who report competently. Instead, you get a lot of wild conspiracy theories and a lot of commentary. The progressive blogosphere involves plenty of commentary, of course, and relies a decent amount on reporting done by the non-ideological media. But the right, for all its loathing of the allegedly liberal MSM, is actually entirely dependent on it and the cable-Drudge nexus to advance stories.
I think there’s more reporting happening in the conservative blogosphere than Yglesias allows. (Michelle Malkin goes nuts here with a long list that includes some legitimate links mixed in with lots of ringers — but she has a point.)
But I’d argue that the real reason you find deeper and more effective muckraking on the left is that it’s in the ideological genes. There’s more of a tradition of independent investigative journalism — it goes back to I.F. Stone and beyond, to the original muckrakers of the Progressive era. This is because the progressive ideal is rooted in a belief that government has a key role to play in the modern state and its economy. You dig for stories about corruption and bad behavior in government because you believe it has a job to do and needs to do it right. If you believe, as most on the right do, that the best government is the weakest and smallest government — if you dream of “drowning it in the bathtub,” as the ideologues who ran the country for the last eight years did — then why waste your time trying to expose its malfunctions? Why develop a tradition of trying to shame government into living up to its ideals when you don’t share them?
Goldfarb, and doubtless many others on the right, think that TPM and other Democratic-friendly investigative journalism outlets will wither away during an Obama administration because they won’t want to criticize their pals. That assumes the only motivation for investigative reporting is partisanship. My experience at Salon, which has always done its share of exposes on right and left and which thrived under the Clinton administration, tells me he’s wrong.
UPDATE: Simon Owens picks apart Malkin’s roster of conservative scoopery.
Post Revisions:
- January 5, 2009 @ 09:32:32 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- January 4, 2009 @ 23:39:52 by Scott Rosenberg