MALE SPEAKER: a Blog Is Like a Diary Or a Daily Opinion Con That You Post on the Internet

Chapter 11 – Section 2 1 The Mass Media MALE SPEAKER: A blog is like a diary or a daily opinion column that you can post on the internet for all to read and comment on. MALE SPEAKER: Big high profile commercial blogs have become part of the media landscape. FEMALE SPEAKER: Most of the people who read blogs, they are highly educated. They are middle aged and they are high income. MALE SPEAKER: Carol Darr is the Director of the Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. FEMALE SPEAKER: Because the people who are reading blogs tend to be opinion leaders and they tend to be trend setters. So they are influential, far out of proportion to what their numbers are. FEMALE SPEAKER: I think it’s very American, the idea that someone could enter into a conversation, you know, just based on having an opinion and an argument. MALE SPEAKER: Anna Marie Cox started wonkette.com and turned it into a must read for politics junkies. Eventually Anna Marie Cox became so famous she was offered a book deal and a column in Time Magazine. FEMALE SPEAKER: I still can’t quite believe that any of that actually happened, I am still waiting for someone to like, come out from behind the curtain and be like… HA…HA MALE SPEAKER: Well isn’t that the definition of a successful blogger though? To get plucked from the blogisphere and given…. FEMALE SPEAKER: I think that’s what most bloggers would consider success. MALE SPEAKER: Wonkette is typical of the modern commercial blog, breezy, funny and sometimes a little mean spirited. FEMALE SPEAKER: If you have a limited amount of time and energy shooting things down is easier than building things up, so twelve posts a day you are going to shoot a lot of things down. MALE SPEAKER: Carol Darr has noticed this tendency too. FEMALE SPEAKER: You know, these are people who are not alienated from politics, but they are very alienated from Washington politicians, from Capitol Hill and they are frustrated about the status quo.

Content Provided by BBC Motion Gallery 1 Chapter 11 – Section 2 2 The Mass Media MALE SPEAKER: Have you ever been on the receiving end of incorrect or damaging echo chamber blog stuff? FEMALE SPEAKER: Of course, yes it’s not worth the energy of like batting these things down. It’s like a million little gnats. MALE SPEAKER: But what if the attack bloggers aren’t just calling you names, what if they are determined to destroy your business? MALE SPEAKER: That’s what happened to Greg Halpern. His company was preparing to launch a new product, a no calorie fat substitute called Z-Trim when anonymous bloggers went on the attack. MALE SPEAKER: We started getting people that were putting up websites and chatting on chat boards and blogs and saying all sorts of information that we knew to be completely false. MALE SPEAKER: Halpern says he was the victim of stock market manipulators who stood to profit by driving down his stock price. MALE SPEAKER: We went on at first naively saying let’s go explain these people saying the stuff and then they just kept twisting whatever we said more and more. MALE SPEAKER: After months of legal struggles Halpern unmasked his attacker and got the blog shutdown, but it wasn’t an entirely happy ending. His company’s stock had plunged, but isn’t the internet all about free speech? MALE SPEAKER: Yes we’re all for free speech, but somebody’s is going to have to at some point act responsibly about managing the free speech because free speech doesn’t mean liable. MALE SPEAKER: The blog format is only a couple of years old, but already there is a growing tension between many bloggers and what they derisively call the MSM, the mainstream media. FEMALE SPEAKER: They don’t believe that you are unbiased, objective, fair a lot of times, and so what they want is, they want to read a lot of different sources themselves because they don’t trust mainstream media, that would be y’all.

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