The Joys of Blogging to a Very Small Audience

I just read this Tweet from Adam Johnson, one of the political analysts whose writing I have come to trust:

One of the reasons I trust Adam is that I regularly see Tweets where he's asking someone for a link to evidence for something they've said, and whenever he himself is challenged, he always has the evidence immediately available.  (I don't have links for those assertions!  You'll just have to take my word for it.  Or not.)

I've gotten to the point in my blogging where I will see something that, if I can't quickly confirm from other sources, I hold off repeating, and there have been plenty of times when I'm glad I did.  Sometimes these things are even posted on a site of someone whose opinions I value.  Passionate people can sometimes get fooled.

When I first started blogging You Will Anyway, way back in 2003, when the United States went so far off the rails I couldn't contain my dismay and outrage, I tended to have more attitude and a quicker trigger finger, so I ended up putting out some stuff that would embarrass me now.  After a couple of years, and the long hard slog of the presidency of George W. Bush was well into slog territory, I became more discerning about what I was reading and believing.

I stopped following some writers, most notably Josh Marshall at TPM, whom I once quoted quite regularly.  After a period of time, he revealed himself to be whatever the Nth degree of a Yellow Dog Democrat is, backing and promoting whatever the Democratic Party line is at the moment.  He didn't start out that way.  Once upon a time, he was critical in his thinking.  I wonder if increased attention and the desire to curry mainstream favor for even more recognition got in the way.  Or, in the alternative, the government came under the leadership of the Democratic Party.  Maybe he would have been the same uncritical writer he is now back in 2003 if we'd had a Democratic president.  He had a one-man operation blog back when.  It's now a full-fledged media operation with many employees.

On the other hand, I've been following Glenn Greenwald since he first started posting online.  I don't know how I ran across him, but it was from some article somewhere that quoted him, I'm sure. He was blogging back then and writing articles for different news sources. Glenn consistently critiques with a non-idealogical, non-partisan lens.  I trust him.  And yet, essentially since the Edward Snowden revelations catapulted him into the international limelight,  he no longer blogs, but he still Tweets, and he can sometimes get drawn into a lengthy back and forth with people who obviously don't know what they're talking about.  He used to just respond concisely, directly, and to the point, if sometimes curtly, without engaging in sniping or name-calling.  I liked his stuff better when he did that.  I try to allow him some slack, though, because I'm sure that since he's become associated with Snowden, and because he's a gay man living outside the country, he takes many times more the flack and personal attacks that he did before Snowden made him a household word.  I've seen recently a couple of times where he has Tweeted a quick retraction for something he said that he realized wasn't correct or was the result of a misunderstanding.  He doesn't waste any time on an apology, to be sure, but he acknowledges it.  The full length articles that he writes (for The Intercept these days), however, are always well thought out and researched, and I trust the accuracy of them 100%.

This is all to say that I try to make it a point to link anything I post to an article that informs the post.  My personal opinions should be plainly obvious.  If I were to claim, as Vox did, that Bernie Sanders said the system is rigged, I'd make sure I had a link pointing to an instance where he did just that, either a video, or a quote by a reputable news source (if not more than one).  If something seems especially controversial or even slightly "iffy" to me, I either pass it up or try to find several references to confirm it.  I don't want to mislead anyone.  Even though only a very few people ever read any of my posts, I don't want any of them to repeat something that I've printed in error.  In short, I don't want to look like a complete idiot or just another hair-trigger blow-hard.  These days it seems even the people you expect to be careful about sourcing and confirming might not be, something that's just been made stunningly evident in the recent Tweets of MSNBC's Joy Ann Reid* and Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald**.

Not being able to trust news sources makes living in this country and trying to sort out what's necessary to be an informed citizen participating in a democracy very difficult.  Because of that, I can't really get exercised too much about the people who throw up their hands and don't try any more.  (However, if you're not going to try, could you please at least try to acknowledge that there isn't just one way to view things, and there are people who will use the fact that you're human with the attendant psyche and tendencies to pull the wool over your eyes?)

Thanks for reading, and if you find me in error, I will consider it a great service if you let me know.  Or if you need a link to something I post and fail to provide, I'll get that for you, too.  Just post in comments to the applicable blog post.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.


* Joy Ann Reid on Trump:

*Joy Ann Reid spreading Malcolm Nance's false accusation that the Wikileaks release of John Podesta's emails contain forgeries:

P.S.  Malcolm Nance has no standing to give an "official warning" in the first place.

**Kurt Eichenwald on Trump: