Posted by
NOTLEGALROADKILLYET on Sunday, February 11, 2007 2:04:58 PM
I am not a welcome "guest" in the Gazette Telegraph's editorial pages. Not only did they not choose to publish my proposed editorial, Sean Paige, Jeff Thomas, and Scott McKibben lacked the courtesy to acknowledge its receipt.
Here is what I submitted:
Since I started blogging about six months ago, I've noticed a difference in attitude between the liberal MSM and the conservative MSM toward blogging.
Liberals accept and promote blogging and individual liberal bloggers. Conservative papers like the Gazette Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal try not to mention bloggers, and when they do, they attempt to ridicule and downplay their significance.
In the last 45 days, the Gazette published a George Will editorial which claimed that 99.9% of the 100 million blogs worldwide were unserious and implied that the remainder should be ignored as well.
A week later, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial by Joseph Rago who asserted that blogs were "written by imbeciles to be read by fools."
This month, the Gazette took another swing at blogs by reprinting a Sacramento Bee article by Rick Kushman. In it, he repeated a claim by CBS pollster that only 8% of the population read blogs. "I think you all must blog each other" David Poltrack said in a cute quote.
Lets begin with an examination of the Will and Poltrack statistics. Will didn't stop to consider that even if one tenth of one percent of blogs were serious, that was still 100,000 serious blogs world wide.
Poltrack's statistics may be close, but if anyone should know the power of blogs, it should be the CBS pollster. The biggest black eye in CBS News history came when four blogs made it clear that Dan Rather had used bad National Guard forgeries to try to impact the 2004 election.
Yes, it took CBS months to come clean and for Rather to exit "gracefully." That incident made it clear that the authors of some blogs are not imbeciles and the only "fools" reading those blogs were the MSM executives who thought no one else was reading them or cared what was written.
Newspapers are "old media." When Radio and TV came along, they claimed that people who wanted more than headlines had to go to print for the full story.
Recently, the editor of the Gazette told of receiving $20 from a reader who wanted a story told. He commented that it didn't have the space to print every story, and that it had to make choices.
The advantage of bloggers is that the "ink" is free and the space is unlimited. If a blogger has special knowledge of a subject, he can write on it with his only cost being his time. Because of search engines like Google, people who have an interest in his subject will find him.
Do all blogs put out junk as Will and Rago would have you believe? Not at all. Newspapers often publish editorials on Federal Court issues that are of dubious quality. Editors would do well to consult SCOTUSblog.com before publishing if they want to sound knowledgeable.
Eugene Volokh is a respected libertarian law professor who runs Volokh Conspiracy. He doesn't draw Rago's "fools" to his blog. Recently, several law students credited his blog and the people who were making comments with sharpening their own writing and speaking skills. They thought that the blog, itself, was leading them to better grades.
I recently met Dick Wadhams and told him I was a blogger. His comment was that blogs had helped John Thune beat Tom Daschle in 2004.
My guess is that if Wadhams is elected to lead the Colorado Republican party, there will be more emphasis on the internet.
I recently gave a talk to some El Paso County Republicans that I titled "While you were Out-The Democrats took over the internet." The Democrats are very effective at using YouTube, Wikipedia, Google Bombs, and blogs to demonize Republicans and promote Democrats.
Republicans don't even notice, in part because their conservative media is telling them to take no notice.
While the Gazette is trying to downplay blogs and pretend that they have no influence, liberal blogs are quoted by name as authoritative sources about weekly in both the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. They have also been quoted by name on Denver's PBS station.
If the Gazette is attempting to damage blogs by its negative coverage, it is only partially successful. It is discouraging conservative readers from going to conservative blogs.
If only the liberal MSM outlets had the same Neanderthal view of liberal blogs that the conservative MSM has of conservative blogs. Alas, that is not to be.