Publishing Today: 'Against the Corporate Media'

An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming today from Bombardier Books. "The Birth of the Blogosphere," by Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

We live today in a post-blogospheric media age. The blogosphere hasn’t disappeared by any means, but it no longer plays the central role that it played from roughly 2002 to 2008. This is partly the result of natural media evolution but also the result of very deliberate action on the part of some big players in government and tech. The blogosphere’s successors, such as Facebook and Twitter, lack its independence, its decentralization, and its free-flowing nature. On the other hand—very much against the wishes of their creators—those entities have nonetheless empowered ordinary citizens to push back against government- and media-initiated disinformation (to the extent that there’s a difference anymore) in a way that remains within the finest tradition of the classical blogosphere.

I had been a regular and prominent commentator on Slate’s then-excellent discussion board, The Fray, for quite some time, and the Slate editors were quick to include InstaPundit in their “Me-Zine Central” directory, at which time I thought I had really made it. I remember by late August I was talking with a colleague about my traffic, at the time around two- to three-hundred visits per day, and we both thought that was a lot. Links from Slate, Virginia Postrel, and James Taranto’s Best of the Web feature at The Wall Street Journal boosted traffic, and by September 10, 2001, I had reached the heady heights of more than 1,500 visits per day. The next day was September 11, 2001, and everything changed.

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I was at the doctor’s for a nasty sinus infection when the towers collapsed. I got to my office shortly afterward and posted the following:

TOM CLANCY WAS RIGHT: And we’re living one of his scenarios right now. Not much is known for sure, but it’s obvious that the United States is the target of a major terrorist assault. There’s a lot of bloviation on the cable news channels, most of which will turn out to be wrong or misleading later. Here, for your consideration, are a few points to be taken from past experience:

The Fog of War: Nobody knows much right now. Many things that we think we know are likely to be wrong.

Overreaction Is the Terrorist’s Friend: Even in major cases like this, the terrorist’s real weapon is fear and hysteria. Overreacting will play into their hands.

It’s Not Just Terrorists Who Take Advantage: Someone will propose new “Antiterrorism” legislation. It will be full of things off of bureaucrats’ wish lists. They will be things that wouldn’t have prevented these attacks even if they had been in place yesterday. Many of them will be civil-liberties disasters. Some of them will actually promote the kind of ill-feeling that breeds terrorism. That’s what happened in 1996. Let’s not let it happen again.

Only One Antiterrorism Method Works: That’s punishing those behind it. The actual terrorists are hard to reach. But terrorism of this scale is always backed by governments. If they’re punished severely—and that means severely, not a bombed
aspirin-factory but something that puts those behind it in the crosshairs—this kind of thing won’t happen again. That was the lesson of the Libyan bombing.

“Increased Security” Won’t Work. When you try to defend everything, you defend nothing. Airport security is a joke because it’s spread so thin that it can’t possibly stop people who are really serious. You can’t prevent terrorism by defensive measures; at most you can stop a few amateurs who can barely function. Note that the increased measures after TWA 800 (which wasn’t terrorism anyway, we’re told) didn’t prevent what appear to be coordinated hijackings. (Archie Bunker’s plan, in which each passenger is issued a gun on embarking, would have worked better). Deterrence works here, just as everywhere else. But you have to be serious about it.

I think these observations have held up pretty well, alas, but they came at a time when most regular media was paralyzed. Many media sites actually dropped off the internet due to traffic, while the cable TV channels simply ran the same footage of airplanes hitting the towers over and over again while “experts” bleated nonsense. (As in every crisis, a major theme was that Americans would have to “grow up” and surrender freedoms to government.) I then started posting news as I could find it, along with correspondence from knowledgeable readers. I had intended to maintain as much normality as possible and still teach my afternoon constitutional law class, but it soon became apparent that that would be pointless, so I just kept blogging.

James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal linked my site again that day as a good place to go for news and information, and my traffic jumped to a then-inconceivable 5,500+ visits. And the post-9/11 era saw a very real, and not entirely welcome, change in the blog. In its first month or so it had been much more of a tech and pop culture blog. Afterward, it became what was known as a “warblog,” one
devoting much attention to the war in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq, among other places. And it paid more attention to politics than I had in the early days...

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