Politicians face these issues every time they speak in public and are skilled at doing so. Being a member of the Irish Government and responsible for European Affairs didn't stop Roche criticising Klaus in trenchant terms.
That is true as far as it goes, but what makes blogs and other grassroot media different from broadcast media is the possibility of a real dialogue. A courtroom spiel or a sales pitch is a monologue (or, in the case of a courtroom tactic, two or more opposing monologues).
It's not just about keeping away from flame wars, or not divulging confidential information - rules every good blogger should follow. It's about being inflexible, not circumspect.
And an interview situation is much more controlled than a blog dialogue. For one thing, there's only one interviewer - or at most two - so you don't have to repel criticism from more than a couple of directions at once. Second, it is very hard for the interviewer to point out that the person he is interviewing is simply flat out wrong on the facts, or that you are lying to his face - that's against the genre convention that the interviewer has to be "neutral."
Third, the interviewer is on the clock. A blog conversation spans hours or days and it's asynchronous, meaning that each contributor can take as much time as he needs to get his thoughts in order. So it's much harder to parry a point with a glib one-liner that leaves the other guy groping for words. But unlike LTEs, which are similarly asynchronous, the record of the conversation is readily at hand, so you can't simply pour the inconvenient parts down the memory hole.
In short, there are structural reasons that make it much more challenging to get away with giving a sales pitch (or with playing fast and loose with the facts) on a blog (or another grassroot medium) with an even moderately attentive audience than in a newspaper or TV interview, given the same audience.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
But once you get people reading and commenting together, there's the potential to influence politicians in the same way that lobbyists do.
The key is voting demographics. Voters are mostly conservative and older, which is why the BNP is running its ridiculous Spitfire+Churchill campaign. They're aiming for the generation which can identify with those, and that won't mean people in their 20s and 30s.
Once that older generation is the one that remembers blogging, a decade or two from now, politics will have to become more interactive. The MSM will have faded and/or fragmented by then, so a simple one-to-many message will no longer be practical.
On the other hand... have you taken a look at a YouTube comment thread recently?
Most blogs include have a culture of their own, and dissenters can always be taken out and shot. Or banned - whichever is easier.
So scrappy free for alls aren't inevitable. You only need good enough moderation for something worthwhile to emerge.
And blogs have a very live reputation. When Kos bans someone, all of the related communities know about it. So there's a feedback feature there which makes it possible for respectable non-flame-ish blogs to coalesce and start having an effect.
All that is required is that the politician shows that he has read and taken some account of some of the main points of a conversation in a subsequent post. In fact it could be argued that the comments space if where the constituents get a chance to have their say and the politician should give them the space to say it in their own way. You can't win with a bunch of people who are just trying to prove they're smarter than you and looking for a chance to catch you out.
You just go to the next post and articulate what impact the discussion has had on your thinking. The guys who want you to endorse every line of their spiel are the guys you don't want to be dealing with directly. You have a very large and diverse constituency to represent and can't allow yourself to be rail-roaded by a few zealots - unless you happen to agree with them! notes from no w here
