Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press
By Eric Boehlert
Free Press
280 pages, $26

in his classic The Boys on the Bus, Timothy Crouse showed how a cluster of bigfoot reporters from the old print and broadcast media steered the narrative of the 1972 presidential campaign. In Eric Boehlert’s Bloggers on the Bus, the vehicle in question has become purely figurative—a way of saying that influence has now been passed from the old bunch to a raggletaggle sprawl of liberal bloggers, scattered from Alaska to Brazil and known collectively as “the netroots.” (The coinage mashes together “grassroots” and “Internet.”) Although the netroots were mostly pro-Obama through the 2008 campaign, and helped him by challenging many of the falsehoods spread about him, this support was neither uncritical nor undivided. Nor, on the other side, did the Obama organization choose to associate itself closely with the bloggers, no doubt viewing them as uncontrollable. In general, Boehlert admires the work of the netroots. Yet he also describes ferocious internecine debates, such as the division over sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton, and the disillusion over Obama’s uncertain positions on warrantless wiretaps. Overall, he shows how the work of the netroots—for example, a citizen journalist’s impromptu tape of Obama’s “bitter” remarks—offers hope that ordinary people, not at all bigfooted, may alter the political landscape.

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