On filters

Needless to say, Murray Mandryk's latest column can't pass without some comment. But it's worth noting that while Mandryk is off base in his view of citizen involvement in politics whether through blogs or otherwise, at least part of the problem looks to be his willingness to take at face value some party presentation which requires some clarification and correction of its own.

Here's Mandryk's mandatory quarterly potshot at the blogosphere:

Lingenfelter's communications director recently spoke to the University of Regina's senior extension class and a nice old gent in attendance was kind enough to forward the NDP communication strategist's presentation. In it, Lingenfelter's chief communicator calls Internet bloggers "unfiltered, independent, instant and affordable" and specifically praises the province's three biggest NDP blog sites. The problem with dealing with the "traditional media" -- the newspaper, radio and TV reporters the communications director deals with every day -- is that they "filter" the NDP's message and "many times the reporting is biased." (Presumably, unlike non-biased NDP bloggers.)

Now, to the extent one assumes that there's a clear difference between bloggers spreading party messages unfiltered and media who are set apart by applying some editorial analysis, there would indeed be reason for cynicism about the role played by bloggers.

What Mandryk seems to miss, though, is that any claim that a party's message will be passed along "unfiltered" through blogs is itself somewhat misplaced.

Of what I'd consider to be the leading Saskatchewan NDP blogs (without knowing which ones were included in the presentation), there's a broad continuum including some based predominantly on reinforcing party positions, along with some which make a consistent effort to provide angles beyond the party's position and analyze/critique its actions. And even in blogs which fall mostly under the former category, none simply unthinkingly passes along all party positions which happen to surface in the news or on a party website; instead, it's the individual blogger who decides which issues are worth posting about, with the effect of shaping the type of message which gets presented to the blog's audience.

So what does generally come through unfiltered is the opinion of the actual blogger - with the varying extent to which the blogger's priority is to directly convey party messaging serving as only one factor in that final output. And while the final product on a supporter's blog will generally tend to amplify parts of a party's message to the extent those factors overlap, the blogging process is also an opportunity for two-way communication - as the party is able to see which issues are seen as resonating and which ones aren't piquing the interest of its online supporters and their commenters.

Moreover, one can hardly call most media outlets free of bias. And most of them pretend to be neutral even while presenting content which does favour some interests over others - while most political bloggers will acknowledge that their own views do play a role in their content.

All in all, then, while parties and media may want to label independent blogs as outlets for party communication for entirely different reasons (the party in order to label blogs as a useful tool for partisan purposes, the media in order to discredit them as news outlets), they're both equally wrong in seeking to apply the label.

Of course, it's also true that while blogs make for both a useful source of information and a valuable method of conveying it, any political party is bound to recognize that it needs to reach potential supporters through as many means as it can. Which makes the next part of Mandryk's column downright stunning in the standard it sets for the NDP and the NDP alone:

However, this distrust in the "traditional media" to report the NDP's message doesn't mean that Lingenfelter is any less eager to manipulate them. Recently, the Leader-Post has been receiving letters to the editor with suspiciously similar wording -- all critical of Brad Wall.

When some of the authors were contacted by the newspaper for confirmation before publication, they said they didn't write the letters, but signed their names to them after they were handed out at an NDP meeting. One elderly woman said in an interview she agreed with what was in the letter but, "I don't pay much attention to politics anymore."

This may be another reason why the public has trust issues with Lingenfelter.

Now, if Mandryk is just discovering for the first time that groups of all kinds of political persuasion sometimes ask supporters to sign their names to favourable letters for publication, then I'll gladly welcome him to...what, the 1970s? The 1920s? The dawn of the newspaper itself?

Which isn't to say that I'm a fan of the idea as compared to the alternative of having a supporter express that opinion in his or her own words. (Nor indeed the practice of putting words in others' mouths in general, as I mentioned several times during the NDP's leadership race.)

But it's entirely off base to pretend that a concept which ought to be familiar to anybody with even a passing knowledge of political activism - and which has surely only grown in scope in an age of instant communication where it's possible to make an online submission based on a pre-written letter in a matter of seconds - somehow matters as an individual trust issue related to Dwain Lingenfelter alone. And if Mandryk feels the need to invent such a non-issue to reinforce a "don't trust Lingenfelter" narrative in an effort at "balance" against the fact that he's used some column space to point out the Sask Party's gross mismanagement of the province, then that likely serves to highlight exactly the kind of skewed filter that the NDP rightly wants to bypass.

Edit: fixed wording/labels.