The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  The blogosphere isn’t some mindless eruption of wild opinion. That isn’t their power. This is their power:

  1. They use the tools of journalists (computer, keyboard, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to ask the question) and of the Internet (Google, LexisNexis) to look for and find facts that have been overlooked, ignored or hidden. They look for the telling quote, the ignored statistic, the data that has been submerged. What they are looking for is information that is true. When they get it they post it and include it in the debate. This is a public service.

  2. Bloggers, unlike reporters at elite newspapers and magazines, are independent operators. They are not, and do not have to be, governed by mainstream thinking. Nor do they have to accept the directives of an editor pushing an ideology or a publisher protecting his friends. Bloggers have the freedom to decide on their own when a story stops being a story. They get to decide when the search for facts is over. They also decide on their own when the search for facts begins. It was a blogger at the World Economic Forum, as we all know, who first reported the Eason Jordan story. It was bloggers, as we all know, who pursued it. Matt Drudge runs a news site and is not a blogger, but what was true of him at his beginning (the Monica Lewinsky story, he decided, is a story) is true of bloggers: It’s a story if they say it is. This is a public service.

  3. Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: “Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report.” In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that’s new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That’s not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn’t carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago. In the old days a lot of interesting information fell off the editing desk in this way. Now it doesn’t. This is a public service.

  4. Bloggers are also selling the smartest take on a story. They’re selling an original insight, a new area of inquiry. Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles has his bright take, Andrew Sullivan has his, InstaPundit has his. They’re all selling their shrewdness, experience, depth. This too is a public service.

  5. And they’re doing it free. That is, the Times costs me a dollar and so does the Journal, but Kausfiles doesn’t cost a dime. This too is a public service. Some blogs get their money from yearly fund-raising, some from advertisers, some from a combination, some from a salary provided by Slate or National Review. Most are labors of love. Some bloggers—a lot, I think—are addicted to digging, posting, coming up with the bright phrase. OK with me. Some get burned out. But new ones are always coming up, so many that I can’t keep track of them and neither can anyone else.

  But when I read blogs, when I wake up in the morning and go to About Last Night and Lucianne and Lileks, I remember what the late great Christopher Reeve said on “The Tonight Show” 20 years ago. He was the second guest, after Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield did his act and he was hot as a pistol. Then after Reeve sat down Dangerfield continued to be riotous. Reeve looked at him, gestured toward him, looked at the audience and said with grace and delight, “Do you believe this is free?” The audience cheered. That’s how I feel on their best days when I read blogs.

  That you get it free doesn’t mean commerce isn’t involved, for it is. It is intellectual commerce. Bloggers give you information and point of view. In return you give them your attention and intellectual energy. They gain influence by drawing your eyes; you gain information by lending your eyes. They become well known and influential; you become entertained or informed. They get something from it and so do you.

  6. It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs, to some degree, members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you’ve lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you’re over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web.

  There are blogs that carry political and ideological agendas. But everyone is on to them and it’s mostly not obnoxious because their agendas are mostly declared.

  7. I don’t know if the blogosphere is rougher in the ferocity of its personal attacks than, say, Drew Pearson. Or the rough boys and girls of the great American editorial pages of the 1930s and ’40s. Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore. I don’t know how Walter Lippmann or Scotty Reston would have seen the blogosphere; it might have frightened them if they’d lived to see it. They might have been impressed by the sheer digging that goes on there. I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them—but, well, too bad. I’ve been attacked. Too bad. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course.

  I conclude with a few predictions.

  Some brilliant rising young reporter with a growing reputation at the Times or Newsweek or Post is going to quit, go into the blogging business, start The Daily Joe, get someone to give him a guaranteed ad for two years and become a journalistic force. His motive will be influence, and the use of his gifts along the lines of excellence. His blog will further legitimize blogging.

  Most of the blogstorms of the past few years have resulted in outcomes that left and right admit or bray were legitimate. Dan Rather fell because his big story was based on a fabrication, Trent Lott said things that it could be proved he said. But coming down the pike is a blogstorm in which the bloggers turn out to be wrong. Good news: They’ll probably be caught and exposed by bloggers. Bad news: It will show that blogging isn’t nirvana, and its stars aren’t foolproof. But then we already know that, don’t we?

  Some publisher is going to decide that if you can’t fight blogs, you can join them. He’ll think like this: We’re already on the Internet. That’s how bloggers get and review our reporting. Why don’t we get our own bloggers to challenge our work? Why don’t we invite bloggers who already exist into the tent? Why not take the best things said on blogs each day and print them on a Daily Blog page? We’d be enhancing our rep as an honest news organization, and it will further our branding!

  Someone is going to address the “bloggers are untrained journalists” question by looking at exactly what “training,” what education in the art/science/craft/profession of journalism the reporters and editors of the MSM have had in the past 60 years or so. It has seemed to me the best of them never went to J-school but bumped into journalism along the way—walked into a radio station or newspaper one day and found their calling. Bloggers signify a welcome return to that old style. In journalism you learn by doing, which is what a lot of bloggers are doing.

  Finally, someday in America the next big bad thing is going to happen, and lines are going to go down, and darkness is going to descend, and the instant communication we now enjoy is going to be compromised. People in one part of the country are going to wonder how people in another part are doing. Little by little lines are going to come up, and people are going to log on, and they’re going to get the best, most comprehensive, and ultimately, just because it’s there, most heartening information from… some lone blogger out there. And then another. They’re going to do some big work down the ro
ad.

  Campaigns Have Always Been Negative but They Haven’t Always Been Ubiquitous

  The Wall Street Journal: February 8, 2012

  A man’s voice, urgent:

  “America is in crisis. It feels like we’re coming apart.”

  Shots from a hand-held camera—blurry, indistinct. Angry citizens, protests. Close-up on a bearded young man, his face distorted by rage.

  “We face unprecedented challenges.”

  Cuts of lonely farms, small houses with for-sale signs. A little girl with pleading eyes.

  “Is this any time for inexperience?”

  A tattered flag blows in the wind.

  “One candidate has silky words, but what do they mean? What do we really know of him?”

  Video shot from behind a candidate who stands at a podium. We see his back, the jerky movement of his arms. We see faces in the crowd—confused, shaking their heads. Are they being gulled?

  “His backwoods chatter can’t hide the facts. He’s never had a college education—or any education at all. He claims he read the classics at night, by candlelight. But that’s not really what the frontier was about.”

  Cut to a raucous bonfire—frantic dancing, men and women, drinking. A hysterical laugh pierces the outer darkness.

  “He says he’s for the little guy. Why is he hiding the fact that he’s a big-time lawyer who sold himself to the highest bidder?”

  Archival film shot: a saloon table, a wad of bills gathered up by a fat man’s hand. Gleaming cuff links, ruby ring. In the background, a woman’s chuckle. Somehow we know her name is Belle.

  “He served just one term in the House—one. And wasn’t re-elected.”

  Blurry photo of a man. We’re not sure who it is. Slowly it begins to come into focus—stark face, rude cheekbones, slick black hair. Now cut to close-up: his irregular eyes. One pupil is more dilated than the other. He’s cockeyed.

  “He ran for the Senate, and failed.”

  Video of torches being extinguished. A slump-shouldered voter walks away, alone.

  “They said they loved his speeches, but what were they beyond words? His wife? Imperious. His address? Impeccable. As for the family he came from, he left them in the backwoods when he went to the big city.”

  Shot of sad, impoverished family in an empty field.

  Then quick shots: An honest American worker in front of a tool shed. Yearning families on farms and in cities. A little girl holding a flag, which droops wanly on her shoulder.

  “This is a time of crisis—and he’s telling jokes.”

  Screen goes black.

  “They call him ‘Honest Abe.’ But he’s just another Springfield insider.”

  Another man’s voice:

  “I’m Stephen A. Douglas, and I approved this message.”

  So that’s my Abe Lincoln attack ad. It can claim to be factual, or at least arguable, and the parts that are too mean would ensure it got plenty of free play on “Hardball,” “Special Report” and “Morning Joe,” where we’d all deplore it. Then the Douglas campaign would pull it after complaining they have no control over their stupid, independent Super PAC, Americans for Sort of More Slavery at Least for a While.

  I wish someone would make this ad and show it across the country and say at the end: “Cheer up, have faith, greatness is possible, sometimes it’s there but you only see it in retrospect. Not everyone’s a bum.”

  Attack ads are the dreck of democracy. There are too many of them and there will be more. In the next 8½ months we will be engulfed. The Republican presidential primary is in full swing so we’ve already seen Bain Capital Took Your Job and Newt Is a Hypocritical Big Government Hack. Senate and House candidates will launch this spring and summer, so it’s going to get a lot more negative.

  Why are attack ads bad? Because at the end of the day they are damaging to our country and its processes, and they are most damaging to the degree their messages enter our children’s heads.

  Someone once said that if you want to know the source of a person’s political views, go back to the newspaper headlines when he was 20. See what the country was talking about, and how it was talking about it, when he first started thinking of himself as a citizen, a stakeholder, a member of America.

  But imagine you are today 8 or 10 or 12. You watch TV, you hear the radio in the car, you go on the computer, you see the ads. They inundate you. And they make, in the aggregate, an indelible impression: “They are all bad.”

  If your child is a happy little psychopath, he will be encouraged: “Good, I’ll fit right in when I grow up.” But assuming your children are not psychopaths, and in spite of their daily behavior that tends to be true, they will be discouraged. They would never want to take part in public life some day. They would never even want to pay attention to it. Because they want to grow up and be admirable.

  We are poisoning their minds. I used to say liberalism was more damaged by this because liberals are inclined to think the answer to public ills resides in governmental action. Negative ads imply the people who run government are bad, so government must be, too. Why trust it? But conservatism is undercut just as much, certainly now, because to make the changes they want, they need big numbers, big margins. Numbers come from passion. Passion is diminished by sourness, by “they’re all bums.”

  Many say our politics are no more negative than they used to be, and they have a point: It’s always been a brute sport. We all know the drill, from “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa?” to the presidential election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson had one of his henchmen—excuse me, surrogates—accuse John Adams, in a series of newspaper essays, of being a “hideous hermaphroditical character,” a “strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness,” a “repulsive pedant.” That’s worse than what Mitt said about Newt. By the end, Adams was so beside himself he lost his temper and called Alexander Hamilton “a man devoid of every moral principle, a bastard… a foreigner.” That’s worse than what Newt said about Mitt.

  The man in front of whom Adams lost his temper made sure to get the word out, through letters, the press and word of mouth. And that of course is what’s different now. They didn’t have mass media to blanket everyone’s minds. You used to have to be sort of sophisticated to know Alexander Hamilton hated Adams. You had to read long newspaper accounts to find out why, and you had to go to the city to find the newspapers. You could find it if you wanted to, but if you didn’t, there was less chance it would find you.

  And now there’s no place to hide. All screens are on.

  What remedies might ease this situation will have no impact on 2012. What about self-policing?

  You there, political consultant, genius ad cutter, sitting at your laptop reviewing the images and the script. Are you making a brutal ad to take the enemy down? Are you thinking of anything but your status as an effective guru and your pay? Are you thinking at all of the net effects of your dark work?

  No? Then a curse upon you as you hit “save” and “send.” May your hand be palsied. May it lose its power.

  On Immigration…

  I care about immigration so much because I came from immigrants, feel and am close to their lived experience, and care about America. Who we are and how we operate matters.

  And I’ll tell you now what I’d do about immigration if magical powers were suddenly granted to me.

  I would first find every profession that needs more members in the United States, and I would see to an increase in legal immigration for those professions. A sovereign nation has a right to decide what it needs.

  I would, for reasons of national security and also fairness to those here, clamp down on our southern border and stop illegal immigration. I would do what it takes—a wall of bricks or a wall of soldiers, whatever will work. I would set federal agencies to find and expatriate those from other countries who have illegally overstayed their visas.

  Having controlled the border and the visa situation, there would be less of an air of crisis about the entire
issue. Everyone would spend the next five years settling in to the new reality. I would try to figure out what the U.S. saved by stanching the flow of illegal immigrants, take that money and dedicate it to the teaching, assisting and encouraging of America’s long-term unemployed and underemployed.

  After five years, with the crisis abated and the clamor quieted, I would announce a one-time-only amnesty for every illegal immigrant living within the United States. There would be certain regulations accompanying that—no criminal record, learn English, etc. And America, seeing that the crisis was over and understanding the utility of bringing everyone out of the shadows and into the system, would accept or support such amnesty, after a few grouchy arguments.

  It would not be bad for any political party to be the party that stopped the hemorrhaging at the border and later gave amnesty to all within it.

  This of course is fanciful.

  But this is not: The only president who will get, in the future, a comprehensive immigration reform bill through Congress will be a man or woman who strongly opposed illegal immigration and took real steps to stop it. That person will be allowed to be generous.

  * * *

  What Does It Mean That Your First Act on Entering a Country Is Breaking Its Law?

  The Wall Street Journal: December 8, 2005

  As Congress considers the Bush administration’s guest-worker plan, as Republicans try to figure out what their immigration philosophy is and as political observers parse the implications of yesterday’s California House race, here are some small and human questions on immigration to the United States.

  I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn’t show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the New World, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street. (It’s now a Macy’s. I buy Christmas gifts there.)