I guess you can’t blame them… Since the start of the blogging era, the right-wing blogs have been doing the whole “speaking truth to power” thing very effectively. You know the list, Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, John Kerry etc etc.
The world would be a very different place if not for the blogosphere. But all the left wing blogs have managed to do is get some gay guy to stop getting day passes to the Whitehouse press briefings.
The answer is obvious of course. We have the message on our side. Dan says the memos are real, we know better. The NY Times says thousands of pounds of explosives were missing, we prove the Times to be full of dung. More recently some goof-ball communist claims the U.S. military ambushed her but we had the facts on our side again.
So it should come as no surprise that, having no message, liberal bloggers are seeking a way to manipulate the news media. From the NY Times:
Even as online pundits criticize traditional news organizations as slow, biased and technologically challenged, a group of bloggers is trying to use old-fashioned telephone conference calls to share their ideas with newspaper and television journalists.
The bloggers, who describe themselves as liberal or progressive, say the conference calls are intended to counter what they regard as the much stronger influence of conservative pundits online. Bob Fertik, president of Democrats.com, the host of the two calls so far, views them as a step toward getting their reports out to mainstream news organizations.
While there is no way to know precisely who dialed in, reporters from news organizations including CBS, The Washington Post, Newsweek, MSNBC and The National Journal asked for a call-in number, according to one participant.
“We hope to build a bridge,” Mr. Fertik said, adding that different bloggers would be invited to share their reporting on each call. “We hope that good credible stories that are broken on the Internet find their way into coverage in the mainstream media.”The bridge is already there…. It’s called a web browser. If the lefty bloggers have anything worth saying, the message would get out, just like it does from the right. After the Tsunami, a blog that was only like 3 weeks old became the #1 blog in the blogosphere in just a few hours because he linked the videos of the event. When there is content, the blogosphere is breathtakingly efficient.
What is really going on here is that liberals don’t have a message and haven’t had the facts on their side. The right-wing blogs have had a stronger influence because we have had the facts on our side! They have no ideas other than to oppose George Bush and they routinely manage to find a way to be cheering for your enemies. The media does that just fine already!
So the liberal bloggers, being good liberals, play the victim card; “You guys in the media keep reporting what is said on righty blogs and not on liberal blogs.”
This is just silly. The media has more than enough liberals already, they don’t need the blogosphere to play back-up. — Indeed, if there were more conservatives in the MSM, then we right-wing bloggers would not have near as much material.
At the end of the day it comes down to content. If the lefty blogs were on the right side of the facts, the media would find them. Rather than trying to manipulate the media thru conference calls, why don’t the liberal bloggers just get on their blogs and find something impressive to say?
But Noooo… Rather than compete in the arena of ideas, they want a “media subsidy” to “level the playing field.”
They want affirmative action for boring bloggers.
I think you are right, that the problem for liberals is they don’t seem to have much of a message beyond a hatred of Bush and opposition to anything he does.
If Bush announced the sky was blue, I think half the liberal bloggers would argue that it was in fact brown.
“Now is the winter of our discontent…”
Or, as some blogs would have it, “Diss content.”
I guess it’s not enough that Google is willing to throw in the DU, Wonkette and Kos as “legitimate news sources”. It’s not enough that Yahoo news is even doing it now. What they really want is the couch-potato pundit that is too lazy to actually read anything so the left-whackos can spoon feed them more of what they’re already getting by MSM.
This might work in our favor. When a few sensible people see that they’re being lumped in with the real nut cases out there, they may decide it’s time to distance themselves from it.
Or am I too optimistic?
lets see…
I just turned down a 4th request for an interview with an important newspaper, I do not advertise my blog and if you will notice I did not fill in the URL section above.
You see, I found out that if you print the truth, people will find out about you. I have had no need to seek attention and in reality I do not seek it at all.
My little blog will keep on printing the truth.
Good day.
LIE #1: I just turned down a 4th request for an interview with an important newspaper, . . .
LIE #2: My little blog will keep on printing the truth.
Of course the right-of-center bloggers have much much more influence – since the MSM is overwhelmingly liberal already, liberal bloggers are nothing but redundant yes-men.
RE: Magnum Serpentine’s post (March 14, 2005 11:40 AM)
You see, I found out that if you print the truth, people will find out about you…
Hmm. That might explain why I’ve never heard of you. Do you blog?
But, but, they got Jeff Gannon! Oliver Willis is in Day 33 of his quest to bring down Brit Hume! DKos is even now digging up dirt on Ayn Rand to use against Alan Greenspan!
Heheh, just checked out Magnum Serpentine’s blog; he’s clearly a deep thinker for a leftwinger as this passage shows:
“If any of you Senitors or Congressmen vote for mr. bush’s plan to destroy Social Security, you too will be down at the unemployeement office seeking another job because we the people will vote you out of office come next election day.”
Keep telling truth to power, Magnum!
Paul,
I read this post and the other one about the NY Times story of the lefty conference call in my podcast today. The conference call itself is up on the web, and I include 2 minutes of it in my Podcast. Give it a listen if you get a minute. These guys are raving conspiracy nuts.
Podcasting is a technology that is kind of like Tivo for radio. I create a daily program using
audio software and make an MP3 file of the result, then make it available for my subscribers using
RSS. Every show appears in a few hours on the iPods of listeners everywhere automatically. That’s why its called podcasting. You don’t need an iPod to listen, just visit my blog and click on the MP3 link My podcast is a reading of the top blog posts of the day. http://ripnread.blogspot.com.
Hear what the NY Times says is coherent progressive dialog.
Charlie
My my
Julie, such hatrid…
Brainster… Well thats the truth of course. You know, got to watch that third rail.
You spelled “Liberal” wrong in the title.
Good post though.
Magnum clearly forgets the small but growing group of 20-to-40-somethings like myself who realize how badly hosed we’ll be by the current system and actively want to have SS reformed/fixed/scrapped. We don’t outnumber the fogies yet, but if we can get, say, Matlock, to go out there and tell the old folks that no, NOBODY OVER 55 will be affected at all, then repeat that like 400 times to drown out the assholes at AARP, we could just win this one.
magnum:
Commenting on the ridiculousness of your self-serving statements, is not hatred. But, your response does fit with your other post, in that you appear to suffer from some delusion that you are important, influential, and threatening enough to hate. Sorry, pal, you’re pretty irrelevant in the scheme of things.
Here’s some truth for you: When a newspaper calls up trying to sell you a subscription, that isn’t a request for an interview. hth
They’ll hafta get that coverate in purple ink so it won’t make them feeeeel bad….
You must have missed the Minnesota tv crew’s showing the explosives that went missing before the claimed date. They proved the right wing claims were wrong in that instance.
Barbara, I think you stopped following the coverage of that a touch too soon…