Peter Daou has traced the prongs (Salon, sub. only) that elevate certain current issues to prominence, and concludes that — without the concurrent props of the mainstream media and the political establishment — the single prong of blog buzz will not give a story “legs” and legitimacy.


Daou, the editor of Salon’s popular Daou Report — a highly readable blog-tracking page (that you can preview without a subscription) — bunkered in the “war room” of John Kerry’s 2004 campaign where he strove to educate the old guard about the netroots and to develop communications with a core group of bloggers. He also tried to teach the campaign’s leaders, and Kerry, that they couldn’t use e-mail and blogs merely for fundraising.


Having observed Peter’s timely and thoughtful work at Salon, I safely assume that he worked hard to educate the power brokers. He writes in today’s in-depth piece that “the Internet was perceived as a source of cash, not as a research or communications tool. … This was an untapped resource that hadn’t existed in previous presidential elections and I hoped the campaign would harness it, but the prodigious fundraising capabilities of the Internet sucked up all the online oxygen.”


However … (Continued below)

However, my impression is that too many of Kerry’s e-mails discussed drummed-up issues that failed to disguise the e-mail’s real intent: “Gimme more of your money.” Daou chalks it up to a “natural antagonism of the old guard toward the new,” while pointing out that GOP chair Ken Mehlman correctly understood the ‘net’s potential. Mehlman correctly predicted “that the party that dominated the Internet would win the election.”


The Daou triangle is, I think, a great way for us to view the communications structure in which all of us bloggers and diarists are working — and how we are limited in our influence unless we pay attention to the triangulation factor. Daou writes:

[W]ithout the participation of the media and the political establishment, the netroots alone cannot generate the critical mass necessary to alter or create conventional wisdom. This is partly a factor of audience size, but it’s also a matter, frankly, of trust and legitimacy. Despite the astronomical growth of the netroots (see Bowers and Stoller for hard numbers), and the slow and steady encroachment of bloggers on the hallowed turf of Washington’s opinion-makers, it is still the Russerts and Broders and Gergens and Finemans, the WSJ, WaPo and NYT editorial pages, the cable nets, Stewart and Letterman and Leno, and senior elected officials, who play a pivotal role in shaping people’s political views. That is not to say that blogs can’t be the first to draw attention to an issue, as they often do, but the half-life of an online buzz can be measured in days and weeks, and even when a story has enough netroots momentum to float around for months, it will have little effect on the wider public discourse without the other sides of the triangle in place. Witness the Plame case, an obsession of left-leaning bloggers long before the media and the political establishment got on board and turned it into a political liability for Rove and Bush.


Daou points to the Bolton nomination, for instance, as a success because blog pressure was matched by media and input from senior elected officials — ” (the recess appointment was emblematic of Bolton’s defeat, not his victory).” Then there’s failure:

To understand what happens when the online community is on its own, look no further than electronic voting. The progressive netroots has been hammering away at this for years, but the media and the political establishment is largely mute. Traction = Zero. The conventional wisdom puts it squarely in the realm of conspiracy theories.


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