This wise and judicious post should do.
Predictability is good in a watch, bad in a blogger. If you already know what I think about an issue before reading what I have to say, why bother reading it? And why should I bother writing it? (That’s part of the reason I link to only a small proportion of the Kevin Drum or Brad DeLong items I find convincing and informative: “Kleiman agrees with Drum” isn’t really man-bites-dog news, is it?)
We should all be largely predictable (to those who have bothered to understand the texture of our thinking beyond crude categories such as “liberal” or “hawk”) in what we have to say on the issues. And to some extent ideology determines what sort of behavior a person thinks is scandalous. I, for example, am unshocked by leaks of classified information, because I think they mostly serve the public interest, but think that much of what counts as routine political fundraising ought to be prosecuted as bribery and extortion. So I will be more prone, given an agreed set of facts, to see money-in-politics scandals as real, and less prone to see leaks scandals as real, than other people.
But on the facts themselves — whether there existed a blue semen-stained dress, whether Valerie Plame was an undercover officer of the CIA before senior people in the White House blew her cover, whether the story about John Kerry’s affair with an intern had any factual support and what operatives were involved in spreading that report, whether Halliburton’s directors have been vindicated in their judgment that the huge going-away present they voted Richard Cheney as he assumed the Vice Presidency would be a profitable investment for Halliburton’s shareholders — there’s no good (normatively compelling) reason why my judgments ought to match my preferences. ..
So it seems to me that, where there is a legitimate rather than a manufactured controversy, an ideal blogger would depart from the factual claim or interpretation favorable to his side about half the time. Surely, as his “batting average” for toeing the party line approaches .900 he and his readers ought to start to worry.
To which I’d add twothings. One is that bloggers who are also academics, and who are therefore supposed to be institutionally insulated from the need to uphold any party line, are particularly tightly bound by these strictures. An academic who becomes a party hack is an embarrassment– and that’s true whether he or she is hacking on a blog or in his or her books.
The second is the traditional disclaimer: bloggers aren’t under an obligation to blog about everything, or about any thing in particular. Silence about the scandals that afflict one’s own preferred politicos isn’t forbidden by the principles Mark lays out above. But it shouldn’t be silence purely motivated by the desire to avoid embarrassing one’s own ‘side.’
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