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By krempasky Posted in FEC — Comments (1) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Due to some technical difficulties, it's taken us a little time to get the transcript together from Glenn Reynolds' keynote speech from the Politics Online Conference last week. While reading it, keep in mind that Professor Reynolds spoke immediately after FEC Chairman Scott Thomas. (you can read the Chairman's speech here)

To give you a feel for the tone of the speech - and why Glenn deserves the place he holds in the blogosphere, just consider how began his remarks.

Well, I want to thank Commissioner Thomas for providing what I think is the most cogent argument for the abolition of the Federal Election Commission I’ve ever heard.

Read on...and many thanks to RS'er Kowalski for the transcript. As soon as we get the video hosted we'll have that for you as well.

Update [2005-3-21 0:28:29 by krempasky]: Kevin Aylward at Wizbang has the video of Glenn's speech up, and you can see the Q&A at the end, video only till we get the transcript.

TRANSCRIPT of University of Tennessee Professor Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) at the Politics Online Conference, March 11, 2005

INTRODUCTION:

Glenn Reynolds is our next speaker. All of you know him as Instapundit. He will be speaking on “Bloggers: The New Political Power Brokers,” but he told me earlier today that he is just going to use that as a starting-off point for his speech. So, he is a law professor at the University of Tennessee, and I have it on good authority that he is one of the most prolific scholars at the UT faculty. But, what you might not know about Glenn Reynolds is that he’s such a prolific scholar because he drinks a special energy drink. I don’t know if you’ve seen this floating around the blogosphere within the past week or maybe even last year in April, but apparently, he enjoys a good “Puppy Smoothie” every once in a while. “The cuter the puppy,” I believe the quote is, “the better the energy drink.” [laughter].

And there are other rumors about Glenn Reynolds floating around the Blogosphere. I have it on another blog authority that everyone knows that bloggers wear pajamas, and since Glenn Reynolds does not own a pair of pajamas, he’s not a blogger. So, faced with this problem, he has decided to resign, retire completely from public life, and do something totally unrelated to journalism. He is expected, um, The Conservative Cat, and Blogcritics.org both cite, to start his job as the anchor for the CBS Evening News sometime next month. [laughter] So, that said, I’m very proud to introduce Glenn Reynolds.

PROFESSOR REYNOLDS:

I’ll try not to produce the hum, and I’m already failing. Well, I want to thank Commissioner Thomas for providing what I think is the most cogent argument for the abolition of the Federal Election Commission [laughter, applause] I’ve ever heard. [laughter, applause]

My proposal was going to be that the media exception be broadened a bit, or the internet exception, uh, to a free speech exception, in which you are allowed to say what you want about political candidates without fear of prosecution by the government. [applause]. Call me crazy, but I thought it made sense.

Well, the title of my talk, which I did not actually select, is “Bloggers: The New Power Brokers.” What bloggers really are is not power brokers, so much, though there are a few who aspire to that role – they are “power breakers.” What bloggers have done is cut back on the power of gate-keepers, of middlemen, of agenda setters, by allowing the end run, that sort of thing. And that has opened up communications vertically, horizontally, and in all sorts of ways.

The other interesting thing that blogs do is they establish trust. They establish trust with strangers, and I have this phenomenon every time I come to events like this: I meet people that I’ve never met in the flesh before, and that I know only through their blogs, and I feel like I already know them, and I’m usually right, that I know them pretty well. And I’ve come, many times, to rely on people based on what I’ve read on their blogs. Um, some of you may remember one example, the Iraqi blogger, who reported on war crimes by U.S. troops...a lot of people doubted him...I was inclined to trust him, because I’d read his blog for quite a while, and I felt like his other stuff was accurate, and this was in character...turned out to be true, alas.

Blogs have some real virtues, as well, in politics. They excel at fund-raising. They excel at motivating already active people. They’re not so great at reaching people who don’t care. You have to decide to read a blog. If you want to get couch-potatoes who haven’t made up their mind the day before the election, blogs are not the way to go. They don’t convert the uninterested, but they do motivate the motivated.

Actually, the blogosphere has been divided, and artificially so – first by the war and by the elections, but we are becoming united again, I think on the left and right, by new enemies – chiefly the Federal Election Commission. [applause]. And I want to thank them for being uniters and not dividers. [laughter] The bankruptcy bill has played a similar, if smaller role. I have a few cynical observations on whether blogs will be regulated by the Federal Elections Commission, and what’s going on.

My first thought is: nobody should be regulated by the Federal Elections Commission. [applause]. Um, my second thought is that if there is a media exception, blogs should qualify. Though I suspect that if there is a media exception and blogs qualify, the exception will devour the rule. I think that’s the FEC’s fear, uh, but as we say at Microsoft, because I’m technically sort-of a Microsoft employee thanks to my MSNBC blog, “It’s not a bug – it’s a feature!” [laughter] Those are words we live by. Now, it may be that nothing will come of this regulation. In fact, I told somebody that we should sleep soundly, because we have the word of two senators that nothing will come of this. And if you can’t rely on the word of two senators...you’re in Washington! [laughter]

We can, I think, rely on something a little more cynical. The FEC may wish to learn from the example of another regulatory agency with very similar initials...the FTC. The Federal Trade Commission has had its head handed to it a number of times on trying to regulate things. The characteristic, when I teach this stuff in my Administrative Law class, of the people who hammer the FTC when it tries to regulate them, is that they are people who are pretty well wired-in, and who are located in all congressional districts. So when the FTC, for example, took on used car dealers and funeral home operators, it really regretted the result, because every single member of congress heard from constituents in his or her district who lived right there, who cared a lot about the issue, and who were politically fairly well connected, and fairly well off.

Well, according to Technorati, there are 7.7 million blogs now, which, it has helpfully been observed by Roger Simon, is more than there are voters in John McCain’s home state. And if you look at the blog ads, blog reader, and blogger survey data that came out, it’s a demographic that looks to me to be as formidable...as used car dealers or funeral-home operators.

[7 second gap in audio]

...unlikely that an effort to regulate blogs will succeed given the size of the universe of things that has to be regulated, and the rather powerful desire not to be regulated, uh, that seems to grip most bloggers. At least, I’m unaware of any blog, actually, that’s endorsing the notion of FEC regulation. With 7.7 million, there’s probably one out there somewhere, uh, but I don’t think it’s a majority.

I think that it just would be a bad idea, and might be actually quite destructive for the FEC’s overall position were it to try.

But it’s not really just about blogs, and, and I do want to rain a little on blogger triumphalism here, even though I’ve engaged in a bit of it myself. Uh, we talk about blogs, and often we talk about blogs as a sort of shorthand for “new media.” And in fact, it’s really about new media, it’s not just about blogs. What we look at as the blogosphere today looks very different than it looked when I started just a few years ago, back when the term was...“Me ‘Zine”...perhaps the only term worse than blog...that anyone ever came up with [laughter] to describe it. The blogosphere looks very different, and there was a wonderful cautionary phrase by Jesse Walker uh, in Reason, he said, he “...remembered during the first Gulf War how ‘revolutionary’ CNN seemed, and by the second Gulf War, it looked like a dinosaur.” I think the same kind of thing may happen with blogs, they’ll be replaced by something else.

What they’ll be replaced with is alternative media in all sorts of different forms. And actually, we’re already seeing a lot of that. Filmmaking is cheap, Podcasting is coming on, it’s still more a subject of buzz than actual listenership I think, but it’s always that way at first. Uh, I think that uh, we’re going to see alternative channels of media, lower costs of producing all sorts of media, we’re going to see a lot more video and such. We’re already seeing uh, this outgrowth of filmmakers – I see Evan Coyne Maloney is here, he’s somebody that’s profiting from the low-cost, high-quality filmmaking technology now that lets you do stuff and distribute it by the web as well – it’s going to be well beyond blogs. And if the FEC, or anybody else, tries to adopt a narrow view of “what’s media,” of “what’s a blog,” of “what’s free expression” they are always going to be brought up short. They’re going to be brought up short by the two things that make the new media so exciting and so wonderful: the rapid improvement of technology, and people’s powerful desire to speak.

My own theory is that we’re actually evolutionarily “hard-wired” to share our opinions, back to when we lived in tribes, and it was important that you told somebody next to you, “You know, there might be tigers in that cave.” You had a powerful desire to share these views. And the tribes that had people that shared the views about the tigers in the cave...tended to do better...[laughter]...than the tribes that didn’t. And so we’re all their descendants, and we like to talk. We like to share our opinions, it’s built-in, and now, lots of people can do it. You don’t have to find some corporate sponsor who will spring for $50 million dollars worth of equipment to film you, and distribute your image around, you can do it yourself now. And people are doing it.

Blogs are just a tool. They’re not the new power brokers, they’re just a tool. People are the new power brokers. And I say, and I hope the FEC will say, “Power to the People.”

Thank you very much.