BU on Politics: Kos: All Politics Are Bloggable

This week, we look back at the year in politics at BU — from alums with a national voice to experts on local issues.

Markos Moulitsas began his blog DailyKos.com in 2002 with a 10-word post: “I am progressive. I am liberal. I make no apologies.” Five years later, the nation’s top political analysts aren’t asking for apologies — they’re asking for advice. With over a million visitors a month, the Daily Kos has become the most widely read political blog in the country and has transformed grassroots activism in the Internet age.

Moulitsas (LAW’99) talked with BU Today last Friday shortly before delivering the keynote address at BU’s daylong conference New Media and the Marketplace of Ideas, sponsored by the College of Communication, the School of Law, WBUR, and the law firm of Prince, Lobel, Glovsky & Tye, LLP.

BU Today: Many of the contributing editors at DailyKos.com don’t have a politics or journalism background — they’re doctors, sociologists, stay-at-home moms. What is the value in giving these political outsiders a platform?
Moulitsas: They haven’t had a platform in the past. These are the people who have been marginalized or taken advantage of by the so-called political experts. As we’ve seen in the past couple of decades, the experts have no clue how to run the country. They have no clue how to gauge political sentiment. They have no clue how to even run political parties, at least on the Democratic side. The amateurs are just as good if not better than the self-proclaimed experts. We’re tearing down this barrier between the people who claim to know the answer and the masses.

I don’t think there’s necessarily any individual out there who may be smarter than the smartest political consultant. But as a movement, as millions of people working together, we’re clearly far more effective than anything that’s come before. I think the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections is a testament to that.

You earned a law degree at BU. With the “anything goes” approach to what’s published in political blogs today, should bloggers become more familiar with their legal rights and obligations as journalists?
I would disagree that it’s an “anything goes” atmosphere. Bloggers are, legally and ethically, operating under the same rules TV pundits do. Bloggers aren’t necessarily journalists, but legally, they’re as liable. They have to follow libel law and intellectual property laws. And now we have a federal shield law that’s winding its way through Congress that explicitly provides bloggers with the same protection as the media have.

Sure, there are unethical bloggers. Blogging is just a medium, like newspapers. The medium doesn’t imply that a particular source is credible. There are blogs that have credibility and some that are completely ignored because they don’t. The difference is that our credibility is built on the quality and merit of our work. We can’t say, “We work for the New York Times, therefore we’re credible.” Those journalists imply credibility from the publication they work for. We actually have to earn it, and therefore I think it has more value than that of the so-called traditional press.

As a blogger, you’ve acknowledged that you’re an activist, not a traditional journalist. Do you think readers who are turning more and more to the Internet for both news and opinion have become better at recognizing the difference?
One of the dangers I see is that readers see something that validates their worldview and think therefore it must be true. There are people on my side of the aisle who won’t believe a word George W. Bush says, and then they see an article saying we’re on the verge of attacking Iran and they automatically assume it’s true. As I’ve made clear when I write and do my own reporting, just because I hear it doesn’t mean it’s true. I get nervous when people claim truth or claim they have the answer. We should be skeptical of everything we read.

The vast majority of people on a site like Daily Kos understand that. When you throw out a post on our site, half the commentary is, “Do you have a source for this? Where’s your link? Can we trust your credibility?” That’s the way we should be. We’ve learned that the Internet has a lot that’s not true, but that can be said of the traditional media, too. The assumption that something is true just because it’s on paper needs to be abandoned.

We began to see the influence of the Internet in the 2004 elections. How do you think blogs will influence the 2008 elections?
There are several roles that the Internet plays here. One is to activate and energize the party base, the activists, the people who do all the work it takes to win elections — walking neighborhoods, licking envelopes. We need those people, and we need to educate those people. I often get asked by the media, “Aren’t you just preaching to the choir?” If that were such a bad thing, we wouldn’t need churches, would we? The right has been doing this with talk radio for decades, and we haven’t had our own version of that.

The second role is the rapid reaction role. The right wing is always in attack mode, and liberals really haven’t had a mechanism to respond in the past. In today’s world it would be a lot more difficult to smear Al Gore for “inventing the Internet.” That quote was completely accepted as fact by the traditional press at the time — a major failure on their part. Now we have a way to expose those unsubstantiated charges.

The third role of blogs, which I’m really excited about, is defining storylines in each race. We can help craft narratives that define our candidates and our opponents. In 2004, John Kerry was a flip-flopper and Bush was a strong, bold leader protecting us against the terrorists — at least, that’s what I remembered. Those narratives shape what a campaign looks like, and the right wing has been very good at creating them. In 2006, Democrats were actually very good.

Who’s capitalizing on the grassroots Web campaign movement better, Democrats or Republicans?
Democrats are already proving that they’re far superior to Republicans by all measures. Look at the size of the Democratic crowds at candidate events compared to crowds at Republican events. If you look at the money race, we’ve raised more in small-dollar donations than they’ve raised altogether in the presidential race, as far as I know.

Do you think the Republicans will eventually pick up on the Internet as a fundraising and campaigning tool?
They never really needed it before. They’ve been very good at getting small donations in the past via direct mail. Now direct mail has become obsolete. The people who fill out a check are old and dying off, and my generation — well, I can’t imagine being caught dead writing a check.

Changes in the Democratic Party came because we had been out in the wilderness forever. Normal people like me were upset that we weren’t winning elections, and we helped create a new regime where people could be more involved in politics and educate themselves online. That’s not happening on the right yet. I think if they’re out in the wilderness for a decade, the grassroots forces will be more empowered to create those tools than they are right now.

What Republicans have been good at online is message control through their party machine. They can get out a message like nobody’s business — as opposed to liberals, who couldn’t be on the same page to save our lives. We finally have a medium that, as it turns out, has turned a weakness in our movement into a strength.

Katie Koch can be reached at klkoch@bu.edu.

This article originally ran October 30, 2007.