Lecture: Paul Mirengoff
Paul Mirengoff at NYU. Photo: Elizabeth U. Tsai.
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Back when he used to watch The CBS Evening News, with Dan Rather, Paul Mirengoff used to throw his shoe at the TV screen in anger. Little did he know that he and two other bloggers on the conservative website, Power Line, would end up uncovering information that would force the well-known newscaster to resign. Blogging has made Mirengoff famous, in media circles, as the citizen journalist who in September 2004 exposed the memos cited by Rather as fake. The memos were used by Rather as evidence that President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard was less than honorable. According to Mirengoff, when his college debate partner, John Hinderaker, first approached him with the idea of contributing to a group blog, he was nonplussed.
"I didn't know what Hinderaker was talking about," said Mirengoff in a lecture to a group of students and professors at the NYU Department of Journalism on November 2. "Blogging?"
The journalist and Net activist Dan Gilmor has called blogging "citizen journalism." Mirengoff, who is an attorney for the Washington, D.C. firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, readily admits that he is no journalist. Even so, proving that the memos Rather was waving around were fakes required a fair bit of investigative journalism on the part of Mirengoff and fellow Power Line bloggers John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson.
In his lecture, Mirengoff spoke about blogging's effects on the media landscape and his hopes for blogging in the future.
Mirengoff compared blogging to pre-1960s journalism, when, in his opinion, there were mostly partisan voices. Before the '60s, he said, there was more competition, which he believes yielded more opinionated journalism. By the '60s, there were three major networks, whose news and programming Mirengoff said were indistinguishable; in his opinion, there were only two major newspapers that mattered. "Walter Cronkite would say, 'And that's the way it is,' and we would believe that that was really the way it was," said Mirengoff. "It was one voice serving as gate keeper."
Mirengoff's question was: How did we get from what he believes was the healthy marketplace of ideas of the past to a hegemonic media landscape where only a few major media outlets told us how things were supposed to be?
In his opinion, the introduction of television brought an authoritarian approach to journalism; by the 1970s, argued Mirengoff, the spirited partisan debates of previous decades had given way to what he characterized as the uniformly liberal perspective of most mainstream media.
"Bloggers have not toppled the MSM," said Mirengoff, "but we pose a considerable threat."
"Mainstream media is biased towards liberals," said Mirengoff, speaking for himself and his colleagues at Power Line.
Thanks to what he perceives as the decentralizing technology of the Internet, journalism is now moving toward more competition and fairer reporting, said Mirengoff. Nonetheless, he is still disappointed with what he insists is the mainstream media's continued liberal bias.
Discussing the profound influence the media exercise over the public, Mirengoff used the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as an example. "In my opinion, the MSM [mainstream media] coverage was dreadful," he said. Conservative bloggers felt the reported number of hurricane-related dead was implausible, he noted, adding that he found news accounts of murders and rapes in the New Orleans superdome even more implausible. However, polling shows that the media have influence that conservative blogs lack, he said.
"Bloggers have come a long way" toward parity with the MSM's influence on public opinion, said Mirengoff, "but we're not there yet."
Mirengoff is hopeful about the future, when he believes that writers with more talent will join the world of bloggers and, eventually, blogging will become economically self-supporting. Soon, he speculated, blogging may be a form of journalism that will offer full-time jobs for many. Even if blogs cannot compete with the mainstream media in terms of cultural impact, he said, they can serve as an alternative news source for many media consumers.
"Bloggers have not toppled the MSM," he said, "but we pose a considerable threat."
Mirengoff wondered if there would be a blogger news service in the future, using mainstream news accounts as fodder for media criticism and political commentary. "If a person were so inclined, he would never have to read a newspaper or watch a newscast," said Mirengoff.
The one thing that bloggers can't supply, he said, is non-partisan journalism that is, to coin a phrase, fair and balanced. "You don't blog to be neutral, you do it because you have an agenda," he said. "Ninety-nine percent of what I contribute to Power Line is opinion."
And his opinion on liberal blogs?
Mirengoff feels that they're not that influential yet, nor are they very good at generating buzz in the mainstream media, although they're more effective than conservative blogs at rallying their activist troops.
"My view of them is that if they can't push their story into the mainstream media, I don't have to worry," said Mirengoff.
In the meantime, Mirengoff suggested, the public can expect conservative blogs such as Power Line to become even more influential as they continue to critique the media, while of course, pushing an agenda.