Typing Truth to Power

Bloggers take on St. Louis fellowship of the Tweed Ring

August 27, 2009

5:38 PM

Remember Ritzy Mekler, the St. Louis springer spaniel who cast a ballot in the 2000 presidential elections? She was 13, pretty old for a dog, but not old enough to have learned that trick in Tammany Hall. Some say voting dogs are not the worst symptom of machine politics in St. Louis and that politicians who deliberately keep the public in the dark have been running this town since the days of the Tweed Elite.

If that was ever true, it’s not anymore. After all, George Washington Plunkitt never had to deal with blogspot.com. Local blogs like 15thWardSTL, Ecology of Absence and the Arch City Chronicle (which does double duty online and in newsprint) have been keeping a close eye on city politics and reporting on smaller—but no less important—stories that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch doesn’t always have the time or resources to cover. Bloggers are not only breaking stories online but also appearing on national news; Antonio French of PubDef and Steve Patterson of Urban Review were both tapped by NPR for commentary during the November elections.

Lucas Hudson, editor of the ACC, is taking the blog revolution with a grain of salt, though. He points out that it’s still an elitist format; the elderly and the poor often don’t have online access. “And I think it’ll necessarily lead to sloppier journalism,” he adds, noting that he always spends more time crafting a print story than a blog entry, even if it’s breaking news. “You have major news outlets who’re biased—but when you filter things through the eyes of one person, the bias becomes a bottleneck. When people start trusting that as if it’s just another news outlet, there are unforeseen problems of accountability and presenting things fairly.”

“We publish things we don’t agree with,” ACC publisher Dave Drebes says, explaining that the staff considers the newspaper its main concern. “When we supported [Mayor Francis Slay’s school-board candidates] everyone was, like, ‘How can you do that? You’re supposed to be progressive.’ But the kids cannot read. This isn’t about supporting the teachers’ union. We took a lot of flak. Just being against Slay does not make you progressive.” Hudson agrees that blogs, being inherently countercultural, tend to “be anti just to be anti.”

Despite their drawbacks, Hudson and Drebes both see local blogs as more positive than negative, especially in light of the effects of St. Louis’ “archaic” aldermanic system. “Is blogging good for democracy? Absolutely,” Hudson says, “and, with the ability to leave comments, there’s this potential for community in-teraction. Privileged commu-nity interaction, but still.”

Brian Marston is the creator of STL Syndicate, an RSS feed site for “twitchy news junkies” that posts content from several local blogs, including Urban Review, The Commonspace Blog, Blog Saint Louis and StL DiatribeR. He agrees with Drebes’ and Hudson’s criticisms and shares their optimism, especially when it comes to blogs’ ability to evade the spin doctors.

“If you’re a PR person, it’s pretty easy when you have one daily newspaper that’s the source for serious journalism,” Marston says, referring to the Post. “You only have one place that you have to have a handle on—but with blogs, it’s like many-headed hydra you can’t control ... even if you get a handle on one, another one pops up.”

Marston feels that “the future of blogging is actually vlogging,” or video blogging. French, who previously published PubDef in newspaper form (as the weekly Public Defender) before going exclusively digital last year, uses a sizable number of videos on his site, but they’re a far cry from Mentos–and–Diet Coke clips on YouTube; he posts edited footage of neighborhood association meetings, police-board meetings and one-on-one interviews with Mayor Slay. Trained as a professional journalist and well versed in the challenges of running an independent newspaper, French feels that the blog format has been much more effective and calls print “a dying medium.”

“When I was still at the newspaper, there were major political stories in St. Louis that I felt were just not getting the coverage they deserved,” French says. “That was my motivation behind starting it. But just the barriers to getting a small newspaper off the ground, it’s almost impossible.” He says he won’t be doing PubDef forever, but for now, with daily papers struggling to stay relevant and more people looking online for news, being a one-man operation on the Internet is working well for him. PubDef was recently mentioned on Meet the Press, and one of French’s clips (on the ACORN voter-registration controversy) was broadcast on the Fox News cable network.

Real-estate agent Steve Patterson (p. 100), who maintains Urban Review, agrees that bias is rampant in the blogosphere but says that’s not always a bad thing.

“I do have an agenda,” he says, “and that’s urban St. Louis. I want a vibrant urban core to this region. But that’s not a hidden agenda—it’s very blatant.”

Patterson (whom Marston credits with pretty much singlehandedly sparking the Jennifer Florida recall fever that whipped through the South Side earlier this year) says that blogs are great at keeping public officials accountable when they attempt to dazzle their constituents with revisionist history. “We can say, ‘No, here’s the timeline, and here’s the PDF documents and here’s the audio; it’s all documented online.’”

Michael R. Allen and Claire Nowak-Boyd, who run the equally urban-minded Ecology of Absence, focus on historic preservation but share Patterson’s enthusiasm for blogs’ ability to open up public dialogue when it comes to urban planning.

“If the particulars are out in a blog the day before a meeting, or even a few hours ahead of time, the general public won’t show up to interfere, but people with a bigger stake will,” Allen says by e-mail. “That’s where blogging is most powerful—providing a constant flow of information to those people already paying attention. Blogs like mine may not reach the masses like a newspaper, but they reach the people already inclined to do something. Those people spread the ideas and facts farther and wider than the blog itself.”

Of course, all this could change, depending on how the FCC responds to the net-neutrality debate. If telecom companies like AT&T have their way, the Internet will look more like cable TV, and blogs may get lost in the static. In the meantime, though, they’ve brought some transparency—and dialogue—to local government.

“In politics, perception is reality,” says French. “The perception has been, for a long time that in this town, the watchdogs have been asleep. That has changed ... and we owe that to the power of technology.”