Bill Gardner cites research showing that even people with big megaphones (e.g., U.S. Senators) have not apparently influenced public opinions regarding the Affordable Care Act. He reasons therefore that health policy bloggers, with their smaller audiences, haven’t a prayer of shifting public debate:
If you view yourself as a writer in service to a political movement, a soldier in the skirmishes over the daily meme, then give up. You are throwing pebbles, hoping to breach a castle wall.
Gardner’s comments were focused on health policy bloggers (e.g., Austin Frakt), but could be made more general. Why should Mark Kleiman bother to blog about drug policy? What does Harold Pollack think he is accomplishing by writing about criminal justice policy? Or to take it to a more personal level, who am I to delude myself that the hours I spend blogging about public policy affect public opinion one whit?
I will let my friends Austin, Mark and Harold answer Gardner’s challenge for themselves if they wish, but for me at least the response is simple: I have no expectations that my blog posts will sway mass opinion so it doesn’t bother me that they don’t. The main places at which I blog about public policy have a far larger audience than most…but since most blogs are read by hardly anyone, that’s just a nice way of saying that from the viewpoint of the mass public, I labor in obscurity.
A memory of a Roger Mudd story during his time on Macneil/Lehrer News Hour makes this okay in my mind. His segment examining who watched their show revealed that it had an extremely small audience, indeed laughably so by national network standards. But it was an unusually policy-connected, policy-saavy audience, and that’s what made the show important.
Years ago I got a telephone call from a journalist at the Economist who wanted to talk about drug policy. I asked how he found me, i.e., was it through some newspaper that quoted me or the medical school press office or what? To my surprise and delight, he said that he and his colleagues had long followed Mark Kleiman’s and my blog posts on drug policy.
I discovered over time that our readers also include other journalists, elected officials, Congressional and White House staffers, police officers, health care system managers, teachers, judges, economists, social workers, physicians, university administrators, business leaders, civil servants, policy analysts and many other people who regularly face up to the challenge of designing, analyzing and implementing public policy. We also have many readers — and this is reflected in the quality of our comments section — who are not public policy professionals but are public policy buffs: They have studied up on water conservation or solar power or Middle East politics and they take the trouble to share what they have learned with the rest of us.
Add up all the people who implement public policy, study it, or just know a lot about it, and you get a sadly small number, way too small to ever kid myself that my blogging could move mass opinion in a country of over 300 million people. But what it clearly can do is put good information and ideas into the hands of people who matter in and care about the public policy world. It can also provide me with an opportunity to learn from my readers and thereby come to a better understanding of the policy issues I care about. The public at large will likely never know (or care) about this ongoing exchange of wonky material within a small community. But I do, and that’s enough to keep me going.