Compliments of the NYTimes
Are Bloggers Setting the Agenda? It Depends on the Scandal
By TOM ZELLER Jr.
In the spring of 1712, the British essayist Joseph Addison rambled from pub to parlor seeking the pulse of his countrymen regarding rumors (false, it turned out) that the king of France, Louis XIV, had died. The St. James coffeehouse, Addison reported in The Spectator, was "in a Buzz of Politics."
In the 18th century, "buzz" was part of what social theorists called the emerging - and powerful - bourgeois public sphere. In the 21st century, the buzz is in the blogosphere.
Or at least, that's the popular mythology. As a result of their influence in incidents like the "60 Minutes" episode in which CBS was duped by forged documents related to the president's National Guard service, bloggers have taken on the role of agenda-setters - citizen scribe-warriors wresting power from a mainstream media grown fat and lazy.
But according to a preliminary study - the first rigorous look at the influence wielded by political blogs during the 2004 presidential campaign - bloggers are not always the kingmakers that pundits sometimes credit them with being. They can, it seems, exert a tremendous amount of influence - generate buzz, that is - but only under certain circumstances.
Buzz is potent stuff.
"Buzz can alter social behavior and perceptions," wrote the authors of "Buzz, Blogs and Beyond," published last week by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the market research firm BuzzMetrics. "It can embolden or embarrass subjects. It can affect sales, donations and campaign coffers. It can move issues up, down and across institutional agendas."
To analyze Web log buzz, the study zeroed in on a few dozen political blogs, from left-leaning forums like Daily Kos and AmericaBlog to conservative ones like Instapundit and Power Line, as well as middle-of-the road sites like BuzzMachine and Wonkette. All were "filter blogs," or blogs that comment on - and link to - content found elsewhere on the Web, according to an emerging taxonomy of the form.
BuzzMetrics tracked the frequency with which "buzz topics" - Mary Cheney, the Osama bin Laden tape and so forth - appeared in the last two months of the campaign, not just on blogs but also on other "channels": the mainstream media, official campaign statements and other Internet forums like newsgroups. The resulting "fever lines" charting the results on a graph, the study's authors suggest, offer a glimpse into which channels set the agenda and which react in response.
Whether that methodology proves sound after other researchers have had a chance to digest the findings remains to be seen, and the study's authors caution that their findings are still being fine-tuned. Comparing buzz in the cheap and limitless space of the Web against buzz generated in the finite and expensive news space on television and in newspapers is, after all, fraught with pitfalls.
Still, on issues like Iraq, weapons of mass destruction or the military draft, the Pew study found the chatter profile to be mixed, with buzz originating from several information channels. In instances in which blogs took the lead, such as the mysterious bulge that appeared on President Bush's back during the first debate (a radio receiver, some liberal blogs posited), they were often unable to get other channels to follow.
The CBS News scandal, in which the network based a critical report on President Bush on what turned out to be forged Vietnam-era documents relating to his National Guard days, was another story. In that case, the researchers suggest, the conditions for a broad-based scandal - and potent blog buzz - were ripe.
Although left and right diverged on theories of who might have been behind the fake memos, there was broad agreement that political dirty tricks were involved, and the blogosphere lighted up with detective work and theorizing.
The high name recognition of CBS News and Dan Rather helped, as did the fact that the network and the anchor initially defended the memos, creating grand targets for the longbowmen of the blogosphere. And both the timing and the high stakes made for fertile buzz territory.
"This was not a cold or distant case," the study suggests. "The election was weeks away, and the candidates' service records during the Vietnam War had been a major topic of discussion for months."
For all that, though, the most crucial factor contributing to blog influence in that issue may have been the smoking gun: digital copies of the 1970's-era documents and their impossibly modern fonts.
These became powerful totems because they could be relentlessly examined, tinkered with, traded and discussed online by blogs of all political stripes, each with its own agenda and each contributing to a buzz that ultimately could not be ignored.
In the absence of such a totem, the ability to generate buzz in the blogosphere, at least for now, appears diminished. (That may change as the number of blogs - now at 10 million, according to the blog search firm Technorati - continues to grow.)
Applying the same methodology last week to the recent Newsweek crisis, in which an apparently incorrect item reporting desecration of a Koran by American military interrogators sparked riots abroad and claims of journalistic incompetence (and political bias) at home, the researchers found blog buzz much slower to develop, despite widespread coverage in the mainstream media.
Why? Perhaps because there was no smoking gun to pass around.
"The blogosphere is half forensic lab and half tavern," said Michael Cornfield, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and the chief author of the study.
"The magic of the Internet is you can be looking at evidence, at direct documentation, while you're talking," Mr. Cornfield said, referring to the fake memos that turned blogs into influential buzzmakers. "It would be as if the Nixon tapes were available in MP3 format during Watergate."
