Singing demonstrators at the Washington Monument. 1963. Photo by Leonard Freed ©Leonard Freed/Magnum Photos

You could spend all day scouring blogs and it would be impossible to find a better series of posts in defense of partisanship in the press than what Michael has put together over at Reading A1. (here, here and here) In a nutshell, Michael says that the worries that our objective press will be lost if the Left tries to fight the Right Wing Noise Machine in kind are unfounded because a) the press has never been objective and b) we on the left have an excellent opportunity to be partisan and honest at the same time, an opportunity that the Right has squandered. He does an especially good job of exposing shallow thinkers like Dana Millbank on the topic:

What really interests me about the Millbank essay is its (utterly unexamined) myth of the press as some sort of neutral arbiter of the limits of public discourse—its implicit notion that the natural and historic role of the press is to establish the ground of fact on which, and only on which, legitimate partisan contest can take place. Absent that operation of the Fourth Estate, we’re to imagine, we find ourselves in a kind of political Twilight Zone, “a postmodern morass,” to quote Millbank again, “where there are no such things as facts, only competing perceptions of reality.”

How many times have you watched a bobble head, Brian Williams for instance, puff himself up to mournfully intone how tragic it is that Americans are getting their news from places that already agree with them? That silly, self-important sentiment has become the refrain of the corporate press as they struggle to stay in charge of deciding what news is fit to print. Michael doesn’t see the point in mourning the passing of that particular institution. From the same post: (emph mine)

When did the consensus-era press ever really speak the truth to power, except from the fringes, or opportunistically? (Not even Watergate, the press’s shining constitutional moment, would have been Watergate without a Democratic Congress determined to use its investigative power against the Executive. Consider Iran-Contra as an instructive counter-example.) The ground of “fact” that we imagine the unaffiliated press to be responsible for policing is the ground of the unexamined assumption, the generally-agreed-upon. Fact in itself has no power to transform the life of the nation until and unless it becomes truth, political truth, made so by people committed to political engagement. To the extent that belief in a neutral press lulls us into believing that political truth is the result of some sort of technical or institutional process, something properly entrusted to a professional elite, to that extent it lulls us from our responsibility as citizens in a democracy to marry information to action.

I would have that last bolded bit nailed to the doors of every A-List blog in Blogistan if I knew how to write the code because that is the point I want to build on today. Michael is talking about the corporate press but the point he makes could easily be applied to bloggers on the Left. We have no shortage of brilliant minds (A-List and otherwise) who rail eloquently and cogently against the dangerous machinations of the radical Republicans, but we are missing the will do take the step that would turn our “generally agreed upon” into political action. Read what Nancy at The Next Tea Party has to say on the subject:

Myself I am obviously torn by this whole blogging exercise. At some point it becomes an investment one is not comfortable abandoning. It gives me rest and release to type trash on an early Sunday morning, especially when there are no tomatoes to pick or bird songs to hear. And even my blog time is torn in two between the need to rant here and the desire to dance There. But in the end, at best my blogs are art; and at worst, a HOBBY — as ultimately productive, proactive and for the Common Good as Mr. Paja’s train board or my dad’s coin collection.

What I do know is any “empowerment” gained is false; any “connection” made is removed, safely contained and devoid of honest intimacy; any true building “dialogue” undermined; any “contribution” made more to my ego than to actually getting anything done. But my true fear is that in reading and writing to all this we dull ourselves into thinking otherwise and sleep well feeling we have done Something, when in fact all we have done is click and type and invent reason to feel privately good about ourselves, as if we have been seen and heard and recognized and as if it matters that we need to be…

The internet and blogs and websites are our grown-up toys really, in all but a few cases, our make believe world where we make the rules and pass all judgements..more stimulating and intellectual than online Pogo but no less of a time waster…our own little hi-tech snowforts from which we lob iceballs at each other and plot the overthrow of the grown-ups.

And we blog this at a time (like All Time) when what we need to be doing is pumping our fists and lighting matches and making real noise, when we could be drawing attention to ourselves on the streets where we can’t be clicked off with one tap of an index finger, when we should be forging intimate bonds that have no firewalls and could be gaining empowerment through our collective pride and not deluding ourselves through competitive self aggradizement. This perhaps IS new..and perhaps the only new news is us.

And hopefully our hobbies are not interfering with our chores.

We need grassroots, community-based network-building like what MoveOn is doing with its Operation Democracy. But we need more. We need a march on Washington against the Bush Agenda. I’m suggesting August 14, the day that FDR signed Social Security into law or August 28, the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington:

At the end of 1962 Randolph began to talk to organizer Bayard Rustin about staging a big Washington demonstration. They conceived of two days of rallying and lobbying “to embody in one gesture civil rights as well as national economic demands.” A coalition would be formed to bring in as many people as possible. A massive protest gathering might be accompanied by direct-action campaigns, such as sit-ins in congressional offices.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had also been thinking about some new and larger form of demonstration. He said to his aides, “We are on a breakthrough…We need a mass protest,” and told them that offers of help had come from certain trade unions and from Paul Newman and Marlon Brando—both “Kennedy men.” King asked the aides to contact Randolph to see if they could all work together. On June 11—the same day that Kennedy made his historic civil rights speech and the eve of Medgar Evers’s murder—King announced to the press plans for a march on Washington.

What in the name of Heaven is stopping us? Are our hobbies interfering with our chores?