NP: Triumph, Thunder Seven

Andrew Sullivan seems to have come around from his initial resistance to President Obama's decision to oppose the release of detainee abuse photos. And he considers this to be a feature of blogs, not a bug:

But this is a blog, written in real time, so allow me some secondary thoughts after a night to sleep on it. In the cold light of morning, it doesn't seem quite so offensive.

I don't buy this argument one bit. I don't have to sleep on it. I don't have to think more about it. I'm sure that, for Sullivan, real-time documentation of his every reaction to every story he can see is both exhilarating and enthralling, but I would much rather he sleep on it first and write about it later. He can explain how he got there at that point, instead of declaring loudly to the world that he thinks one thing and then revising it a short time later. On some level, I think that's becoming his chosen cross to bear -- he makes a lot of noise about how he changed his mind on George W. Bush, Iraq and the Republican party, so maybe he's simply playing to his persona.

The problem is that, even though you're penning your thoughts in semi-real time, that's not necessarily the way they're consumed. You have to, on some level, consider your audience and how they're processing this stuff. In the networked world of the blogosphere, that means you're going to have more level-headed analyses of the torture photos like John Dickerson's in Slate that cites Sullivan by name as one of the online opponents of the decision, when that was so totally yesterday's opinion.

I understand that blogs provide a view of events that is, by nature, filtered through the personality of the writer, but if that personality proves to be fickle and malleable to the point where opinions change on important subjects within 24 hours, it erodes credibility in that initial opinion. Which loses readers and stops people from voting for you for online awards.