As the Libby Trial enters the next phase, I’ve found it interesting to ask the question, what is the trial all about. My most literal friends who are following the trial closely respond with comments about perjury and obstruction of justice in Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame. Some of my more stalwart liberal friends talk about it in terms of Bush’s rush to war and the dangers of the twenty-first century military (and media) industrial complex.

Digging deeper, the trial reflects a couple interesting trends in our country. One is, “who controls the flow of information?” This is not just an issue of who was controlling the flow of information from the administration to the mainstream media, but how the mainstream media controls information when it decides whether or not to run with certain stories, what reporters are willing to tell to investigators and what role investigators need to play in gathering information about what is really going on with our government. It includes the relationship between blogs and the mainstream media in who gets which stories out, and even the relationship between the conservatives and the liberals in all aspects of the media.

Beyond the Libby trial, there are plenty of issues of the relationship between blogs and mainstream media. There is the now age-old question of, “are bloggers journalists”, or its more general form, what makes someone a journalist or reporter? The Media Bloggers Association is providing an interesting environment for exploring the relationship between the liberal and conservative bloggers as their posts appear mixed together in the same feed and some of the conservative and liberal bloggers start interacting.

It also comes out in the discussion of who should be in the MBA feed and whether or not the MBA is trying to "professionalize" blogging or to establish its own ‘brand’ by usurping other brands.

All of this brings us to another set of issues. In our national dialog we need to establish the relationship between competition and cooperation. Too much of our national dialog has been centered around ideas like, “Either your with us, or your against us”, which is perhaps just a reworking of the age old, “America, love it or leave it”, and leads to unilateral foreign policy and lack of informed discourse. There is too much emphasis on the competition and not enough of the cooperation. We see this in the issues between the mainstream media and bloggers. We see this in the conflicts between the conservative and liberal bloggers. Too much blogging is based on bonding social capital, people emphasizing their membership of some exclusive group, a group of people with the ‘correct’ political opinions, as opposed to bridging social capital, working to bring together different viewpoints.

By all of this I don’t want to suggest that we should be searching for a simple, split the difference approach to political discourse. Real breakthroughs come when the synthesis is something completely different from the thesis or the anti-thesis, and not simply some middle ground.

Independent of the outcome of the trial, what will we as a nation learn about the flow of information and who controls it? What will we as a nation learn about returning to our roots of cooperation based on empathetic working together, instead of individualistic competition based on greed and grasping for power? From what I’m seeing so far, not as much as I would hope.

(Cross posted to Greater Democracy)