I have a new essay up at Columbia Journalism Review, this time discussing the role and rise of citizen propagandists, and why that’s such a big deal.
Although a lot of people were thinking clearly about the war in Georgia, these kinds of perspectives were lost in the flood of citizen propaganda coming from partisans of all stripes. Matthew Yglesias recently noted that this is to be expected—and he is right. Rather than negating the complaint about citizen propaganda, however, this gets at the heart of why it matters so much: not only does it specifically fail the reasons blogs rose to prominence in the first place, it is little more than the retrenchment of traditional media biases. As such, the reasons behind much of the push behind blogs are still fully valid, only now the gatekeepers have moved down a level, from traditional media to a layer of blogs just as beholden to personal, rather than institutional interests. The usual suspects pushing pre-spun views of what happened lends them zero value over traditional media sources—surely not what the original architects of the blogosphere ideals intended.
Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys. Comments are welcome.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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{ 9 comments }
Citizen propagandists is such a harsh term. I’d prefer to call it what it is, trolls and fanboys regurgitating the same old arguments framed around a new conflict for the sake of argument. Although you point out for their own self-interest, that interest is not some material gain but instead some misplaced pride in winning the argument, endeavoring for the sake of “I got ya” moments. The issue is simply fallacious since these “propagandists,” much like the generalists of the news media, have no real expertise on the matter and thus have no more contribution to the dialogue than the “Boy cried wolf” personified pundit waiting for history to affirm himself.
It seems to me that there are three or possibly four distinct things to be considered: citizen media, something that might be called citizen public diplomacy, citizen propaganda, and following daskro’s lead above, might be called “useful idiots”. I think that MJT would like to be in the first category but is actually in the last.
I hasten also to mention that private citizens in the U. S. aren’t the only ones getting into the act. Unless you believe that all of the Russian and Chinese commenters that jump on practically every post on either Russia or China are paid government agents, it looks to me as though there’s plenty of Chinese and Russian private propaganda going on.
Those we label as propagandists have an opposing ideology to ours.
Those “sober voices” often drowned out by the overwhelming amount of citizen propagandists flooding the blogosphere must be voices pushing the stealth pro-Russian line that “that neither side is heroic, and neither is villainous—both have done nasty things in the last month, and both have to answer for the death and destruction they caused.”
Moral Relativism applied to the Russo-Georgian war is objectively pro-Russian. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. How Orwellian of you.
Some of us are on the side of the angels.
Some of us are openly on the side of the devil.
Some of us are secretly rooting for the devil, but aren’t very proud of ourselves for that.
And others of us think we’re too nuanced, too expert, too above the fray to believe in angels and devils.
Ahh, the old standby “those who view this event differently are pro-evil” argument. We’ve heard it before, and those who use it are most often unwilling to admit or realize that Orwell, who originally coined the turn of phrase, later considered it a dishonest ad hominem.
To pretend that pointing out the spin and propaganda of both sides — nowhere do I excuse the Russians or Chinese who take to the internet, and if you read the actual essay you’ll see my primary source discusses Chinese citizen propaganda in depth — is in any way helping Russia is to willfully ignore the very complexities I’m trying to highlight.
Ahh, but you think I’m secretly rooting for the devil, as if I’ve at all excused Russia’s actions, demonized most of Georgia’s, or argued that this war was awesome and I’m happy to see Georgia dismembered and humiliated. You have a great command of the facts, seriously.
Orwell called pacifists “objectively pro-fascist” in an essay in Partisan Review in 1942. Yet two years later, he changed his tune. In “As I Please”, From Vol. III, p. 292 of Tribune, Dec. 8, 1944, he wrote:
Think twice next time you invoke Orwell.
Yes, I should most definitely think twice before challenging your mastery of all things Orwellian. You sure showed me.
Credibility matters, and quoting a statement the speaker himself finds dishonest and worthy of apology is pretty bad form.
Good essay. I would agree with Dave Schulers divisions into media, “public diplomacy”, propagandists and asshats/trolls, but I fail to see how M. totten can be construed as anything but a propagandist/tool. My definitions would run something like this:
*Citizen Media – Citizens who try to report from both sides without personal bias, fact-based reporting.
*Citizen Public Dimplomacy – Citizens who try to get the opinions of *both* parts on the table while noting the fact that these are the versions of the players.
*Citizen propaganda – Citizens who willingly act as mouthpieces for one of the parts in the conflict, getting all-expense paid trips to their homelands, writes articles with titles like “The *truth* about xxx” and such like.
* Trolls – People who just jump in and blather without any substance at all.
Hey, and Canoneer#4: I would suggest that the whole dichtonomy of Good vs. Evil, 0 vs. 1 is a false path to understanding the international scene. Please go and read about Georgias first president Zviad Gamsakhurdia and his approach to the Ossetian problem. I am aware of the fact that you US people see 15 years ago as ancient history, but in the Caucasus people have a tendency to remember.
Excellent article.
I wonder, however, if it is true that: ‘in war, truth matters more than ideology.’
History, including the current version, seems to suggest the opposite. Either way, the relationship between the two seems quite complex, glaring counter-examples notwithstanding, and their relative value seems highly dependent on context.
Cheers.
In the case of “citizen propagandists” about the Ossetia crisis the lacking of first hand bloggers are obvious. And for us the missing of first hand English language bloggers . There are translations done now by fellow bloggers mostly from Russian language but it is just dropping. Instead we see heated discussions for example about a short version of a Putin interview in the German tv channel ARD. Near to 1000 comments on the related blog site. It seems the real interest is not Ossetia but how we push our world views into the internet.