Pacific Views

Whose Echo Chamber?

Tonight in Brad DeLong's post about how Christie Whitman strongly urged the President to honestly deal with Global Warming, I found this comment:

I don't want to speak for anyone else, but after 9-11, I spent a lot of time arguing on behalf of us going into Afghanistan and I thought that with the WMD that were supposed to be in Saddam"s hands, there was a case to go into Iraq. (I add that you do not need to now convince me that when future generations look up the word "feckless", the entry will say Dubya's administration) I feel compelled to note this because a common trope on a number of comment boards is 'Hey, everyone knew what Bush was like, so why are you surprised?' Hindsight is 20/20, but, again speaking for myself, we were hoping and praying for a Lincoln, which is why any number of people saying 'I told you so.' doesn't really advance the discussion very much. I realize that it may satisfy the soul to know that one knew before everyone else but I find it a bit tedious. Or perhaps I just feel guilty that I was suckered.

I certainly know he is correct: not everyone knew what Bush was like. And in fact lots and lots of smart people wanted to believe that Bush was the real thing - someone worthy of the respect and deference given to someone who is the leader of our nation.

The other day I read David Weinberger's column, Is there an echo in here? (if you don't have a subscription, view the ad to get a day pass) where he tried to answer the assertion that the Dean phenomenom was not a movement, but a sign of an echo chamber. Coming from the punditry, I'm not surprised to see that this is the story they have about Dean. Nevertheless, I agree with David, that the world of bloggers is not really an echo chamber.

Furthermore, I can identify a real echo chamber that is much worse and that has much more influence than the blogging world can hope to have: the beltway journalists.

As someone who admired and followed Paul Wellstone for a long time, I was more aware of stories that raised questions about the evidence Bush gave for mandating war on Iraq. I was reading stories from USA Today and from the Oregonian and from the SJMercury that said intelligence agents were being forced to change their reports to make the case for war. During the runup to the war, stories that contradicted the Bush talking points would surface in non-beltway papers and then disappear like they never happened. Meanwhile the Washington Post and the New York Times seemed to have set aside their critical thinking caps and appeared to be gungho for war.

By January, I realized there was a serious problem of the "media elite" being so insular. Somehow they had missed all the articles in September, October, November and December that might make them skeptically analyze the story they were getting on the road to war. Meanwhile here I was, a citizen watching from outside the beltway and learning lots from the blogs - especially dKos, and starting to believe the Bush administration was not promoting the war for the reasons they stated. And if they were lying about their reasons here - what else were they lying about?

Fortunately, I had the DKos community. DKos was remarkable not just because of Markos, but because he had people like Billmon (who was not just formally an investigative reporter but also had numerous sources and insight into politcs), Steve Gilliard (who is probably our military historian extraordinaire for the web) and all the hundreds of readers that contributed to a highly educated and aware community. When people like Bill Keller and Josh Marshall were thinking that Iraq was a serious national security problem and Bush was honestly trying to protect the nation, we in the dKos' community were arguing about all the counter-evidence that showed how badly the evidence was being manipulated and predicted the folly that would happen going to war with blinders on. We were definitely more able to see the "truth" than all those experts who were breathing the fear and propaganda lapping around Washington.

I was so frustrated with the supposedly reasonable beltway pundits because they really were blind to all the contradictory evidence and just believed that it was important to "trust" the President because he would never use this emergency for his own political purposes.

Bill Keller, currently chief editor of the New York Times, was definitely more influenced by his own echo chamber than someone like me who was reading more than just one paper (and not just the American press) and who was reading points of view that did not just reflect the beltway thinking.

Brad's commentor was more likely to be listening to Keller than reading dKos - no wonder he feels bad - but he shouldn't necessarily feel guilty. A lot of beltway journalists didn't do any better. Nevertheless, it is they who should feel ashamed of their part in this major screwup since they should have known better.