Though far from wanting to be dismissive about the importance of “experience” in our leaders, I do wonder if the frequency with which the subject comes up in the media, particularly in relation to Sarah Palin, and in spite Barack Obama’s own lack of experience, is not an indication that there is more here than meets the eye. I was thinking of this the other day as I browsed through some blogs offering a selection of takes on the politics of this election and reflected that I would never have been doing that only a year or two ago. Even in 2004 or 2006, although I knew what blogs and bloggers were, I rarely visited their sites and would never have dreamed of turning to them for information or commentary about a subject so important as a national election. I have been a professional griper about the media for 15 years, yet it never would have occurred to me until quite recently to doubt that the only place to read about the big political topics of the day was in the mainstream media, however unsatisfactory I knew them to be. Now, although I still check several major newspaper websites, I spend less time with them and more with the new media. I feel as if a weight has fallen from me.
Nor is it just me. I notice that on that invaluable political website, RealClearPolitics there is less and less of an attempt to distinguish between the links to echt media websites and those to blogs. As they gradually lose their privileged position of gatekeepers and filters for political opinion, “the media” seem to be fading before my eyes and dissolving into a much more diverse and much less easily characterized phenomenon. The result is that, in the media as in the political race they are covering, we are witnessing a battle of the amateurs — and, in part, a battle of the amateurs against the professionals. This casts an interesting sidelight on all the talk of “experience” among the old, gatekeeper media who are jealous of their own experience vis vis the upstarts of the blogosphere. The experience — or rather lack of same — of Senator Obama never seemed important to them because his views on things were perfectly aligned with those of the old media. They had enough experience for him as well as themselves. But the outpouring of fury that has greeted Senator McCain’s selection of Governor Palin as his running mate, especially on account of her lack of experience, must have had something to do with the uneasy sense the media have of their own increasing irrelevance to the political process.