Smothering The Baby

by digby

Responding to Adam B’s post on Kos about how the Domenech affair impacts bloggers, Garance Franke Ruta says that blogs shouldn’t be afraid of regulation:

Adam B and Atrios are right in noting that nothing about the need for members of the press to make distinctions between online personalities who are also journalists and those who also work in politics implies anything about the F.E.C. But after a week in which liberal blogs and organizations, such as Media Matters for American, repeatedly called on the Post to make such distinctions, it’s a little peculiar to turn around now and say such lines are impossible to draw.

Nor ought concern for regulation to be considered “an elitish fetish.” Regulation has been at the heart of progressivism since early in the last century, and the regulatory state is something Democrats have been desperately trying to preserve over the past five years in the face of a Republican onslaught, because it is what has given America back its rivers and lakes, its national bird, and the ability to breathe clean air — among many, many, many other things.

This is true. But I think this blogging regulation proposal may be the first time anybody’s tried to regulate a problem before it even exists. I don’t get it. It’s theoretically possible that something nefarious could happen with blogs and money and politics, but so far it’s been nothing but citizens donating small amounts to politicians and causes at the behest of other citizens — which seems to me to be the essence of democracy.

Nobody was saying that Ben Domenech should not be writing for the Washington Post because bloggers should not be considered press. It’s because the Washington Post should not be hiring political activists to balance non-partisan journalists. Surely everyone understood that. If the Post had been smart enough to hire a “Blue State” blogger from among the ranks of activist blogs along with Domenech, I would imagine this would have taken much longer to unfold. (He would have been found out eventually.)

Let’s not lose sight of the fact that this issue is fundamentally about money in politics not whether certain uncredentailed people are qualified to call themselves “journalists.” And the problem with money in politics isn’t the money itself. It’s the concentration of big money and special interests buying off politicians that McCain-Feingold was designed to mitigate. There is simply no mechanism currently by which this is likely to happen on blogs. And might I make the bold suggestion that we wait until there is evidence that it has before writing legislation to stop it?

Why the big hurry on this? They haven’t even gone after internet commerce yet even though states have been lobbying for years that they are losing tax revenue. The reasoning has always been that nobody knows yet where the internet is going and nobody wants to smother the baby before it even opens its eyes. The same is true here. There will be plenty of time to assess the impact of online activism and partisan speech on elections. Leave it alone. All will reveal itself eventually.

.