An interesting test of the Public Intellectual 2.0 argument
A key point I’ve been making in my recent work on public intellectuals and the blogosphere is that blogs can function as an informal “peer review” system to fact-check, logic-check, and style-check more prominent PIs. I had in mind blogswarms that surrounded people like Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman, and William Kristol when they made tendentious ...
A key point I've been making in my recent work on public intellectuals and the blogosphere is that blogs can function as an informal "peer review" system to fact-check, logic-check, and style-check more prominent PIs. I had in mind blogswarms that surrounded people like Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman, and William Kristol when they made tendentious or flawed arguments. It's not that bloggers are smarter or sharper than other writers -- they're just willing to be more blunt in print. I bring this up because, apparently, Kristol's one-year contract with the New York Times op-ed page is about to expire. On his New Yorker blog, George Packer appraises Kristol's year with an astringent eye: It’s not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn’t attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell—it was an unpredictable year. The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought. Ouch. Harsh but true. I'll go out on a small limb and say that if Kristol gets his contract renewed, then it falsifies my hypothesis pretty well. [And if he doesn't get renewed?--ed. Then it's only weak confirmation. There are other reasons why Kristol would be let go beyond blog criticism -- the election suggests that demand for conservative viewpoints has lessened.] Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan UPDATE: Kristol himself sounds ambivalent about the gig: "It's been fun. It's a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on."
A key point I’ve been making in my recent work on public intellectuals and the blogosphere is that blogs can function as an informal “peer review” system to fact-check, logic-check, and style-check more prominent PIs. I had in mind blogswarms that surrounded people like Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman, and William Kristol when they made tendentious or flawed arguments. It’s not that bloggers are smarter or sharper than other writers — they’re just willing to be more blunt in print. I bring this up because, apparently, Kristol’s one-year contract with the New York Times op-ed page is about to expire. On his New Yorker blog, George Packer appraises Kristol’s year with an astringent eye:
It’s not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn’t attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain’s “suspension” of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouching again and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell—it was an unpredictable year. The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn’t take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp (“Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?”) that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.
Ouch. Harsh but true. I’ll go out on a small limb and say that if Kristol gets his contract renewed, then it falsifies my hypothesis pretty well. [And if he doesn’t get renewed?–ed. Then it’s only weak confirmation. There are other reasons why Kristol would be let go beyond blog criticism — the election suggests that demand for conservative viewpoints has lessened.] Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan UPDATE: Kristol himself sounds ambivalent about the gig: “It’s been fun. It’s a lot of work. I have a lot of things going on.”
Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner
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