In blogs, smoking guns provide ammunition

IHT: "In the spring of 1712, Joseph Addison, the British essayist, rambled from pub to parlor seeking the pulse of his country regarding rumors that the king of France, Louis XIV, had died. The St. James coffeehouse, Addison reported in the Spectator, was "in a Buzz of Politics."

In the 18th century, "buzz" was part of what social theorists called the emerging and powerful "bourgeois public sphere." In the 21st century, the buzz is in the "blogosphere."

As a result of their influence in incidents like "Rathergate," in which the CBS television network was duped by forged documents related to the National Guard service of President George W. Bush, bloggers, with their online journals of opinion and commentary, have taken on the modern role of agenda-setters, wresting power from a mainstream media grown fat and lazy.

But according to a preliminary study, the first rigorous look at the influence of political Web logs during the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, bloggers are not always the kingmakers they are made out to be. They can generate buzz and exert influence, but only, it seems, under specific circumstances.

Even so, to social scientists the buzz is potent.

"Buzz can alter social behavior and perceptions," wrote the authors of a report, "Buzz, Blogs and Beyond," released last week by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the market-research firm BuzzMetrics. "It can embolden or embarrass subjects. It can affect sales, donations and campaign coffers."

To analyze buzz, the study looked at a few dozen political blogs, like leftist forums DailyKos and AmericaBlog, conservative ones like Instapundit and Powerline, and middle-of-the-road sites like BuzzMachine and Wonkette.

On issues like Iraq, weapons of mass destruction or the military draft, the Pew study found buzz originating from several information channels. In instances in which blogs took the lead in buzz, like the mystery bulge visible under the back of Bush's jacket during his first debate with John Kerry, they were often unable to get other news channels to follow them.

The CBS News "Rathergate" scandal, in which the network was duped by forged Vietnam-era documents relating to the National Guard days of the president, was another story. In that case, the researchers suggest, the conditions for a scandal and blog buzz were ripe.

The high name recognition of CBS News and its newscaster, Dan Rather, helped, as did the fact that the network and Rather first defended the memos, creating grand targets for bloggers.

"This was not a cold or distant case," the study suggests. "The election was weeks away, and the candidates' service records during the Vietnam War had been a major topic of discussion for months." For all that, though, the most crucial factor contributing to blog influence may have been the smoking gun: digital copies of the documents, purportedly from the 1970s, in which their modern type fonts were visible.

These images became powerful totems because they could be traded and discussed online. In the absence of such a totem, the ability to generate buzz in the blogosphere appears diminished. That may change as the number of blogs continues to rise. The amount now is at 10 million, according to the blog search firm Technorati, although most of these are personal journals with tiny audiences.

Applying the same methodology to the recent Newsweek crisis, in which an apparently incorrect report saying the American military desecrated a Koran sparked riots, the researchers found blog buzz much slower to develop. Perhaps this was because there was no smoking gun.

"The blogosphere is half forensic lab and half tavern," said Michael Cornfield, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Political Management at George Washington University and the chief author of the study.

"The magic of the Internet is you can be looking at evidence, at direct documentation, while you're talking," Cornfield said, referring to the phony memos in the CBS News affair that turned blogs into influential buzz makers. "It would be as if the Nixon tapes were available in MP3 format during Watergate."