Perry de Havilland gave a talk about “a year in the life of samizdata”, last Friday, at the Tim Evans Parents household, which which got me thinking about the rise of amateurism generally, and the rise of the amateur Foreign Correspondent in particular. I found myself arguing that the present tendency of the blogosphere not to have real foreign correspondents is surely temporary.
Yes, the blogosphere is now a whole lot stronger, as Perry said, in editorial comment on the news than it is in news gathering itself, but soon, I surmise, there will be many new “foreign correspondents” blogging away. I might have added, but did not, that for many of us the majority of bloggers are already foreign correspondents on account of so many of them living in the USA, and many of us not.
How on earth would I have found out about Trent Lott, and about what an imperfect person he is, had it not been for the blogosphere?
(And yes, that is a fine double monosyllable to be called isn’t it? “The name’s Lott. Trent Lott.” But apparently he’s not that kind of forthright, no nonsense person at all. Very nonsensical indeed it would seem. This I have learned from the blogosphere’s numerous American correspondents, lead of course by the ultimate foreign correspondent, Instapundit.)
And the network is growing. One of the more exotic ones is a (for me) recent discovery called China Hand. Here are the concluding paragraphs of a recent piece from him about the recent rise of Chinese Christianity:
I should have seen the writing on the wall in the 80’s when my old teacher, a rabidly leftist ex Red Guard, suddenly started sending Christmas cards. Even today when I passed one of the glitzy new department stores in Huizhou – its whole forecourt is covered in Christmas trees.
The question the Religious Right need to begin asking themselves is: What if the Chinese government suddenly announces it is changing into a Christian country in which most of the leadership and many lower levels openly practice Christianity. It’s not too far fetched. Ever pragmatic, the Chinese leaders know that the Chinese people are much in need of ‘opium’ at present as they struggle with the new challenges of a market economy. And one which makes them more acceptable to the West would be a bonus. Everyone knows that the party is Communist only in name. It wouldn’t take much to change it to the Christian Democratic Party of China. The Democratic element could, for the time being, remain an aspiration just as the Communist element was. But not for long surely.
As for the established US religions, it’s too bad they can’t get access for their franchise operations and branded products – it’s a protected market. But their calls for trade boycotts and human rights investigations against an avowedly Christian country would be somewhat muffled. It would be an interesting situation!
It would indeed. Now presumably this China Hand is not an amateur in the sense of not having any sort of job. “Hand” certainly suggests that he is turning that organ to something useful and advantageous, and when I read back I’m sure I will learn what. But his job is surely not blogging. No one is paying him to write his informative and diverting postings.
How long can it be before the Old Media start simply reprinting “the best of the blogs” pieces like these? And how long before the blogosphere has a network of correspondents all over the planet, each of them as good as this man seems to be?
It’s worth remembering that the original meaning of a “foreign correspondent” was a person a lot like a modern blogger, namely an amateur who just wrote letters from time to time to those friends of his in London (or wherever) who ran a newspaper and wanted stories from faraway places. Then the best of these people started to get paid. Then they started to get sent. What we may now be witnessing is the winding down of that process, ending up with the amateur foreign correspondent who just happens to live somewhere exotic and occasionally newsworthy, and who is thus able to tell us all about some great event in his vicinity a lot better than any ignoramus rushed there by a faraway newspaper one vital day after it all actually happened.
Of course many of the bloggers who at first seem very impressive will turn out to be unreliable or unsatisfactory or just unable for one reason or another to keep it up, but if so we can rely on other bloggers to step up and fill the gaps. There will be a Darwinian sorting process, and the best will be good enough to impact seriously on the Old Media.
(Maybe this Trent Lott business will make the US Old Media really notice the blogosphere. Certainly that’s the gist of articles like the one Instapundit links to, above, or the article that Joanne Jacobs linked to last week.)
I’m in Budapest much of the year, and I’m not too sure readers on the web are that interested in details of life in Hungary.
People still usually look for one thing in a site, and my site would have to become a reports-from-Budapest page to justify that, I reckon.
Lazily, I prefer to just burble on about my life as it suits me….
Glenn just covered this matter at TechCentralStation, calling it someing like the demise of “fuedal” journalism.
I look for bloggers from around the world with political views similar to mine. I might be getting my Norway news from the only two liberty minded people in that country but at least I don’t have to sort through left wing nonsense (like poverty statistics) to find out what’s going on.
The mainstream media (the T.V. networks, the main newspapers, even British journals such as “The Economist”) has been attacking Senator Lott – blogs have not been important in spreading this story.
I doubt Sentator Lott was thinking of race when he said how nice it would have been if Strom Thurmond had been elected President in 1948 – the comments were at Senator Thurmond’s 100 birthday event thing.
Trent Lott just went into politician mode “say what the person you are talking about would want to be said”.
Actually Thurmond was correct about many things in his time in the Senate – for example he was one of the main critics of the tactics used in the Viet Nam war (rather than being part of the “victory is impossible” or “we must support the President” crowds).
“… blogs have not been important in spreading this story.”
The NYT’s Paul Krugman would disagree with you:
And the influence of the religious right spreads much further. The Internet commentator Atrios, who played a key role in bringing Mr. Lott’s past to light, now urges us to look into the secretive Council for National Policy. This blandly named organization was founded by Tim LaHaye, co-author of the apocalyptic “Left Behind” novels, and is in effect a fundamentalist pressure group. As of 1998 the organization’s membership contained many leading Congressional figures in the Republican Party, though none of the party’s neoconservative intellectuals.
A week and a half ago, while the Big Media slept, the blogosphere got Lott dead-to-rights.
Mickey Kaus has more on the importance of bloggers in l’affaire Lott.