How Blogs Failed the War in Georgia
Joshua Foust on Aug 19 2008 at 10:32 am | Filed under: Blogs, Foreign affairs, Josh's Page, Media
Columbia Journalism Review asked me to write an essay criticizing blogger coverage of the War in Georgia. As I’m sure you can imagine, I was scathing.
While this wasn’t necessarily surprising—after all, these blogs all talk in a big circle, and tend to reference each other—it was disappointing. As Reason’s Michael C. Moynihan trenchantly observed, much of the commentary on the conflict resolved into very clear partisan lines: Russia on the Left, Georgia on the Right. Rather than providing the clarity, nuance, and honesty that they promise to provide, the big blogs instead retreated to their comfortable and predictable ideological corners. By keeping to their usual haunts, these blogs did their readers a tremendous disservice: they were just as incurious and ideological as they regularly accuse the MSM of being.
Go read the whole thing.
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The best place I found on the war was AR15.com.
Blogs have serious limitaions when it comes to events such as the war in Georgia. The Russians launched internet attacks that shut down much of the Georgian internet, and Russian controlled country was essentially an information black hole.
Russian lies about Georgian attrocities stood for days before independent sources could question them.
I appreciate your perspective and review. Personally, I felt some pretty profound effects in my own corner of the blogosphere, including having to quit a favorite forum, because I found there was no absence of intellectual prejudice coloring many people’s views, more than I would have expected. Some would call me a “liberal appeaser” just because I’m not ready to whitewash Georgia’s conduct in the chain of events, and because I know too many good people in Russia to abruptly turn against the Russian state just because “it’s what my side’s doing.”
In the days before 8 August I was already dismayed to see the Corsi book promoted by so many people who should know better, among other signs that I wasn’t getting straight talk from anyone, hardly, so I guess I had it coming; maybe this episode in the blogosphere was timely for many of us.
Not being a blog triumphalist myself, my initial expectations about the blogging world’s power to affect the Georgian war were pretty low, perhaps lower than yours, Josh. Even so, you’re very convincing here. I think maybe this is an aspect of the war where Russia was successful in their tactic of cutting off communications from Georgia, especially internet communications. Bloggers are uniquely dependent on others for the raw reporting input they need. Whether intended or not, by depriving bloggers the basic information needed to form opinions, the Russians successfully muted the blogosphere for a while, driving parts of it to distraction.
yours/
peter.
Blech. You need to stop lecturing people on their irresponsibility until you demonstrate a sufficient quantity of it yourself, Joshua. And you weren’t, “scathing.” You were censorious. Censorious, whilst maintaining –at a maximum of real irresponsibility– that Russia would never occupy Georgia…even whilst they were in fact occupying Georgia. As they remain in entrenched occupation of large sections of that country, it’s astonishing that you aren’t issuing apologies for yet another categorical prediction proven utterly unreliable by events. Instead, you’re heaping more blame on people who quite obviously were far nearer clairvoyance than yourself on this matter.
How about a blogger that went ot Georgia?
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2008/08/the-truth-about-1.php