Matt writes:
People -- lots of people -- want to hear Copps talk about telecommunications regulation and what they can do to help fight for a better regulatory environment. And the people aren't lobbyists for phone companies or cable companies or television networks or anything. They're ordinary citizens (relatively speaking) who've gotten interested in telecom regulation and doing public interest activism on that topic.
This is, in my view, one of the aspects of the netroots that gets most overlooked in the media coverage I tend to see. This nexus of issues is an area where until very recently the conversation was entirely dominated by interested corporations. There was no equivalent to labor unions or environmental groups to anything else in civil society to way in. And now there is! It gets much less attention than anti-war activism or sending mean emails to journalists, but these telecom and media regulation issues are a very big deal to the netroots. People didn't just show up to hear Copps speak (and he's not a very good speaker), but gave him a standing ovation when he took the podium and are laughing at his broadband policy jokes (which aren't, in my view, especially funny).
And it's wider than that. Forgetting that this is a Telecom panel, what you have here are dozens ad dozens of individuals who paid a fairly large amount of money to come to Chicago and listen to very technical, somewhat dull discussions of policy matters. That's, uh, not supposed to happen.
In his recently resuscitated article on Why Americans Hate the Media, James Fallows spends some time talking about the media's tendency to focus on the how, rather than the what, of politics:
In the 1992 presidential campaign candidates spent more time answering questions from "ordinary people"—citizens in town-hall forums, callers on radio and TV talk shows—than they had in previous years. The citizens asked overwhelmingly about the what of politics: What are you going to do about the health-care system? What can you do to reduce the cost of welfare? The reporters asked almost exclusively about the how: How are you going to try to take away Perot's constituency? How do you answer charges that you have flip-flopped?
I find the same thing in my writing. I got lots of e-mails asking me to comment on Rudy Giuliani's health care plan. I got very few asking me to comment on polls showing him dropping points to Thompson. Turns out that there's a fairly large number of people who like to hear about health care policy. Not enough to sustain a cable television show, maybe, but more than enough to sustain a blog, and possibly my career.
Indeed, it turns out there's a large number of people who like to hear about, and be involved in, all sorts of policies. Blogs have matched them up with the technical information, experts, and primary source documents that, previously, they couldn't easily access. And this allows them to mobilize, and gain a voice in, obscure policy areas where even a bit of citizen involvement can exert a surprising amount of influence. This is why concerns that blogs will destroy political discourse are so silly. Here I am at the center of blogofascism, and the discourse is more serious, and more substantive, than anything I've ever seen in the media. When's the last time Wolf Blitzer spent an hour on the 700 megahertz spectrum auction?
