Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Blogosphere | Featured Stories — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

If you don't like process-oriented/administrative/let's have a debate with another blog and potentially turn it into a blogfight posts, then you are well-advised to skip this post.

Otherwise, read on . . .

Ann Althouse has written an article about blogging. At the risk of identifying myself as having "vortex envy" (whatever on Earth that is), I have to take issue with part of what she has written because it has to do with RedState policy. Quoth Althouse:

If the blog is open to comments — as mine is — there is a mysterious additional layer of writing. Who are these people who tap into another person's readership? Some of them must be there just to pass the time interacting with other people who have responded to the personal style of the blogger. Others are much more politically engaged, perhaps to the point where you wonder whether they are part of some campaign.

"Political Bloggers Fear Publicists Will Infiltrate Sites" was the headline for the column Alan Wirzbicki wrote in The Boston Globe last Friday. He tells us about a little incident on the Redstate blog, where a commenter seemed excessively supportive of John McCain (who is, apparently, not terribly popular on Redstate).

This moved Erick Erickson, who runs Redstate, to do a little research and discover that the commenter worked for a company with some connection to McCain's political action committee. "This is going to happen more and more, and blogs are going to have to be vigilant," Erickson told Wirzbicki.

Somehow I can't work up much fear over this. How vigilant do I need to be? As long as no one is dropping unverifiable factual assertions in the comments — trying to stir up a scandal for a candidate — why should I care if my commenters have their secrets, their ulterior motives and their as-yet-undiscovered manipulative ways? That's the way life is in the real world.

Well.

To be sure, "the real world" is certainly full of "ulterior motives" and "as-yet-undiscovered manipulative ways" of others. This does not, however, compel those on the receiving end of "ulterior motives and the "as-yet-undiscovered manipulative ways" of others to sit still in the face of such opaque behavior without seeking to encourage transparency. And transparency was needed in the case Althouse wrote about.

Althouse's blog is written by a solo proprietor and as my blogging colleague Dan McLaughlin observed in an e-mail amongst us Contributors concerning the Althouse article, Althouse does not get past the fact that she is writing about our site with a perspective that should be reserved perhaps for sites like hers. Sites whose proprietors "started blogging with a distinct lack of interest in politics." Sites that are solo acts in nature. RedState, of course, is quite emphatically different. Its primary interest is politics and it is more than a blog. It is an online community that encourages political activism through the writings of a select group of Contributors and diary entries of an exceedingly erudite readership class--the best of which get promoted to the front page. Right away then, discerning eyes notice that there is a dramatic difference between RedState's format and mission, and that of Althouse's solo blog.

As a site that has become a player of some importance in the Right-of-Center political world, RedState feels that it has certain responsibilities to uphold. Among them is the responsibility to demand transparency on the part of activists who come to the site to write about the candidates they support. On this issue, our rule is quite simple: Write about what you want, keep it respectful, keep it informative and if you are affiliated with the candidate whose praises you sing, make that point clear and plain so that others know whence your opinions spring and have the proper context with which to gauge those opinions. This is an entirely uncontroversial demand, one that allows the RedState audience to consider an argument for a particular candidate on its merits without wondering or worrying whether some professed admiration for a particular candidate is a wholly spontaneous statement or a calculated bit of astroturfing. Causing people to wonder whether blogposts admiring a certain candidate are genuine or astroturfing takes time and energy away from engaging those posts on the merits and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments those posts contain, after all.

Likewise, if people come to RedState to trash a particular candidate, we would like to know whether they do so out of some spontaneous desire to express their disgust, or whether they are engaged in calculated negative campaigning on behalf of another candidate with whom they have a close affiliation. If we take the Althouse approach, however, and ignore possible "ulterior motives" and "as-yet-undiscovered manipulative ways" of the people who come not to praise candidates they dislike but to rhetorically bury them, we lend unnecessary opaqueness to matters and commentary on negative blogposts will consist largely of whether or not the author of a particular post has "ulterior motives" in writing what he/she writes or whether the writing is by someone with no hidden agenda whatsoever.

We don't like that here on RedState. If you come to praise Candidate A, we want to know whether you have some sort of affiliation with Candidate A. If you come to rhetorically bury Candidate B, we want to know whether you are doing so because the spirit moves you, or whether it is because doing so would help Candidate A--with whom you have an affiliation. Again, RedState is different in style, in tenor, in tone and in its sense of mission than Althouse's blog. What might work for her does not necessarily work for us. The failing of Althouse's article and her critique of RedState is that she does not seem to grasp the difference between her site and ours. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder just how much time she has spent trying to understand RedState in the first place.

Lest you doubt just how serious we are about this, consider the restrictions we Contributors operate under. The Great and Good Leon Wolf, my brother Contributor, volunteered to work for Senator Brownback's Presidential campaign and made an announcement concerning the same on the front page. We are thrilled for Leon. We think he is a great addition to the Brownback team since he is brilliant on multiple levels, passionate about politics and policy, a skilled navigator in the world of online politics and a Chicago Bears fan to boot. (Okay, I think that Leon's Bears fandom helps make him a great hire for Brownback. The rest of the Contributors aren't falling over themselves to cite that golden attribute as one of the reasons why the Brownback campaign is lucky to have Leon in their camp. But you shouldn't worry about that; my taste regarding football matters has historically ranked several sigma over that of my fellow Contributors, Brother Leon excluded.) None of this, however, stopped Supreme Overlord Erick from announcing that henceforth, Leon's writings concerning the 2008 Presidential race would not occupy the front page. As Erick quite properly says, "we don't want [Leon's] access to the front page to be seen as an unfair advantage to Senator Brownback's campaign."

And that is what all of this is about in the end. We want all of the Republican Presidential candidates to feel that they are being treated fairly by RedState.

I realize that this blog post is a whole lot of inside baseball and that there are more interesting things to write about. But when RedState gets a mention in a New York Times editorial (the linked version is the free, non-TimesSelect version) and when that editorial fundamentally and seriously misconstrues RedState's identity, mission and the rationale for its policies, it is time to set the record straight.

Doubtless, my explanation will fail to satisfy Ann Althouse. In which case, I am sure she will exercise the wondrous array of options available to her and go off to find some other site to read.