Sphere of Influence
Blogger David Goldstein kickstarts the Democrats’ hype at HorsesAss.org

By DENA BURKE
Contributing Writer

Budding out of their infancy, blogs have turned into much more than narcissistic domains for promoting one’s individual daily events. Politically active people are utilizing them to comment on news stories, elections, and issues of the day. Some of their comments can go on to create national headlines. Former Republican Senator Trent Lott’s infamous remarks at the birthday party of Strom Thurmond at first went relatively unreported by major newspapers, but bloggers Atrios and Joshua Marshall both wrote on it. When conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote his piece “Trent Lott Must Go,” the conservative media and Republicans followed in suit. The next day The Washington Post covered Lott’s remarks, and 10 days later he resigned.

Seattle blogger David Goldstein’s claim to fame is his initiative to proclaim Tim Eyman a horse’s ass. The media spotlighted his campaign, and soon Goldstein found himself with a platform and audience for discussing and influencing local politics. He transformed his website, HorsesAss.org, into a blog that he updates almost daily with posts on local politicians, policies, and proposed initiatives. With over 3,000 readers per day, Goldstein is among the many bloggers who have the opportunity to shape the media and the population’s understanding of the world and events.

Real Change: How have you recently influenced the media?

Goldstein: The big national story was Mike Brown, the FEMA director, in the days following Hurricane Katrina. I did a post revealing that his prior emergency management experience consisted of 10 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association. He essentially managed horse show judges.

It was an interesting story that came from a reader of mine who is a bit of an Olympian insider and has Arabian horses. She sent me an e-mail and called him an unmitigated disaster. He left the association in the midst of litigation and in bankruptcy. They eventually had to fold and merge with another organization. She couldn’t believe that this was the guy running FEMA, and I posted that on “HorsesAss” late at night. Then I thought, This is national, and I had just started posting diaries on Daily Kos (pronounced Daily Chaos). So I posted it on Daily Kos, and if enough people recommend your diary, you come up in the recommended list. By morning it was on the list, and then Markos Zúniga, who runs the site, frontpaged the story. A couple of other national blogs and eventually Joshua Marshall, who has the most credibility among bloggers, picked it up and elaborated.

At that point, the mainstream media picked it up, and the story framed the coverage of the disaster: the disaster being the administration’s failure to respond effectively. The impact of Bush Administration cronyism came from that odd story about the Horse Association.

On a more local level, I think a lot of people credit me for changing the dynamics of the County Executive race last year. Three weeks out, there had been a poll showing David Irons in the lead or at the very least, neck and neck. The next day I broke a story that I had been working on for weeks, explaining why his parents wouldn’t vote for him. I interviewed his parents, and it turned out the most dramatic reason was that he hit his mother in an explosive rage. The major press knew about it, but didn’t report because they thought it was a he-said-she-said story. But I pushed it into the news, The Seattle P-I picked up on it, and then the TV stations. The polling switched overnight on that race. He went from down three points with women to down 23 points within about a week. I think Ron Sims would have won anyway, but it would have been a real battle at the end.

RC: Why do you think the media picked up on it after you wrote about it?

Goldstein: There’s this chain that stories [follow:] from bloggers, to talk radio, to print, to TV. The trick is to get it to feed up that chain. Sometimes it happens overnight, and sometimes it takes a long time of pushing the story and pushing the story. As a blogger, you’re a kind of unpaid freelance PR department.

RC: What false rumors have been started through blogs?

Goldstein: I’ve gotten things wrong sometimes. I try not to. It depends what you want to call a rumor. There is a certain amount of rumor-mongering that some blogs do. I occasionally talk about rumors and couch them that way. I think that from election coverage, people think that military voters were disenfranchised. They voted and were counted at the same rate as other absentee voters. It was a myth put forth deliberately by the [local, conservative] blog “Sound Politics.” I think that blogs are dangerous because we don’t have editors and there is no hard and fast set of ethics. We each come up with our own ethics.

RC: Do you think it is unethical for blogs to claim to be objective and then not be?

Goldstein: It depends on what they want to be. If their goal is simply to spin elections and politics, it’s clever. I don’t know if it’s unethical. I think it’s dishonest.

In many ways, as a blogger, we have a freedom that journalists don’t have that allows us to be more honest because we’re allowed to be biased. I can come out and say, Yes, I’m a liberal Democrat. My goal is to help Democrats win, help progressive Democrats win, to shape politics locally and nationally, and in that way to have a more progressive government. The balance in blogging comes from there being people on both sides.

RC: You’re not paid by the Democrats?

Goldstein: Oh God, no, but they should pay me. Some people make huge financial sacrifices to blog, and I have been terribly financially irresponsible. I provide an awful lot of value to the Democratic Party. The Democrats can send out a press release on a scandal, and reporters look at it as a press release from the Democrats. If bloggers start writing about it, then it’s not coming from the Democrats. It’s coming from people with some degree of independence. No one tells us what to cover. If the Democrats feed me a good scandal on a Republican, then by golly I’m going to cover it, but that’s not where most of the stories come from.

RC: Do you do investigative stories?

Goldstein: I try not to, but sometimes I have to. An example of an investigative story is recently a blogger did a long critique of Dave Reichert’s latest ad and one of the things he pointed out was that Reichert had a quote attributed to The Seattle Times, but that quote was not in The Seattle Times. The blogger had many other points, but that one piece was the money. I highlighted that in my blog, and within hours the Times was in touch with the Reichert campaign, which then said they would fix their ad.

RC: Is there a natural balance between liberals and conservatives monitoring each other’s blogs for errors?

Goldstein: If you get something wrong in a blog, people will point it out in the comment threads.

RC: Have comment threads influenced you?

Goldstein: I don’t think you can not be influenced by the comment threads. Mine are a cesspool, for the most part. Some commentators I respect more and read what they have said. I am careful about facts, but I am happy to spin, exaggerate, and hype. There have been a couple occasions when I have been wrong and found out through the comments and corrected it. There is a self-correcting aspect of blogging.

RC: Are professional journalists losing their role as the gatekeepers to information?

Goldstein: Absolutely. Journalists and bloggers will tell you that. The newspapers, TV, and radio are reading us all the time and getting stories from us.

RC: Do you think there is a sameness with the Associated Press and shared video feed that blogs are responding to?

Goldstein: One little blogger can create a media stampede. I learned that from the Horse’s Ass initiative. It was just a joke. It deserved, if anything, a little 30-second laugh at the top of the hour, but it got press coverage for six weeks. I think there’s this sense that people haven’t been getting the whole story and they want the whole story. Blogs might not be the best source to get it, because you can get untruths and misinformation from both sides, but consumers are coming to us because they don’t trust the media anymore.

RC: Do readers seek out blogs promoting opinions they already agree with?

Goldstein: Yes, I think there has been a natural progression of media fragmentation that began with cable TV. When I was growing up there were three networks, and now there are hundreds of channels. It’s why the media was so pro-war at first: people wanted to feel good about invading another country. It is dangerous to have a public that seeks out only what it wants to hear, and I know I play a role in that.

RC: Do you think that mainstream journalists have more of an obligation to be unbiased?

Goldstein: They have an obligation, but they don’t do it consistently enough. The idea of objectivity is a fairly modern construct. Go back to the pamphleteers, to colonial days: It was politicized and biased. Go back to the early 20th century: There were a half dozen papers in every town. There was the labor paper and the business paper and the Republican, Democrat, and maybe even a Socialist paper. With consolidation to one or two papers, that’s when they had to create the construct of objectivity. People can’t be objective. It’s not possible. You can try. With blogging, you blow away the idea that reporting should be objective. It’s honest and in context, and that makes our jobs [as bloggers] easier than their jobs [as journalists].

RC: What is the future of blogging?

Goldstein: Over the next decade you will see a convergence. Traditional news coverage will become more blog-like. From a business model perspective, as the model for traditional newspapers disintegrates, there’s more opportunity for making money on the blogging side. As a local blogger, I don’t think I could ever make a living just blogging.

[HorsesAss on Air]

David Goldstein hosts a talk show on KIRO 710 AM from 7 to 10 p.m. Sundays.

[Blog Catalog]

Read Joshua Marshall on U.S. politics from a liberal perspective at www.talkingpointsmemo.com.

Outfitted with a snarky sense of humor that keeps the political talk lively, Duncan Black, better known as Atrios, writes from a similar perspective at atrios.blogspot.com.

Daily Kos (read: daily chaos) talks about the state of the nation at www.dailykos.com.