\n| \n This morning at the fashionably late hour of 10 am, in the Fenway
\n suite of the Hilton, we attended the Blogger’s Brunch, an official welcome
\n on the part of some of the party joes who
\n are in
\n charge of keeping us on-line and out of trouble. We can tell that
\n they are a bit nervous, slightly edgy, at the novel challenge of riding
\n herd on a bunch of in predictable bloggers.<\/p>\n Maybe their mates or drinking buddies have been telling them horror
\n stories, some possibly true, of the grazing and mating habits of bloggers
\n in general. But we were on our best behavior as a parade of quasi-famous
\n hacks and hanger’s on told us how important, and innovative, and exciting
\n we were.<\/p>\n The surprise featured speaker at the Brunch was the man who started
\n all this Internet in mainstream politics, Gov. Dr. Howard Dean. He bounced
\n into the room, seemingly completely recovered from the savage thrashing
\n he took at the hands of the enemies of the opening up of the political
\n process. He opened by taking credit for all of our invitations
\n to the convention, and took it from there. He was more relaxed and convincing
\n than either of the times we had seen him in New Hampshire.<\/p>\n During an extended Q & A he revealed that he really did not blame the
\n Major Media for the failure of his campaign, and that he did more than
\n enough wrong to have blown it without any help from them.<\/p>\n When he started talking about the Internet is when things got interesting.
\n "The critical lesson has not yet been learned," he declared, "Blogs do
\n work!" He really seemed to have absorbed the fact that it
\n wasn’t about the money, but about the INTERACTIVITY, and the capacity
\n of the internet to allow ordinary people to get involved in politics
\n again.<\/p>\n When the Dowbrigade asked Dean if he had talked with Kerry or his campaign
\n about what the Internet is good for anything besides raising money, he
\n immediately got cagey and reverted to talking like a politician. "In
\n the past few months I have gotten to know John Kerry quite well, as a
\n friend, and I am indeed advising him and consulting closely with his
\n campaign, And I don’t feel at liberty to discuss the contents of
\n those conversations."<\/p>\n We took that as a definite yes, although an evasive smarmy yes. Perhaps
\n seeing our frown, he softened and added, "Although discussions like this
\n might have been something we might have talked about."<\/p>\n But the thing that most impressed us and stayed with us was the fire
\n and resentment when a blogger asked him if our inclusion in the Convention
\n meant that we were :"real" journalists now. He responded by wondering
\n if it was really a designation we should aspire to, considering the major
\n media scandals of the past few years. He said that in many ways he found
\n the opinionated, from-the-heart ranting’s of bloggers more honest than
\n the affectedly "objective" reporting of the major papers and networks.<\/p>\n At this point he gave the most effective and succinct of what;s wrong
\n with modern American journalism we have ever heard. "They say that
\n all of their coverage is objective, and sure, in the first few paragraphs
\n they present the basic who what when or where. But by the third
\n paragraph they are speculating – If this happens, it means…… or,
\n The result could be that…… and what follows IS NOT FACT, IT IS SPECULATION.
\n It is opinion, and yet they are presenting it as objective news! And
\n they are doing this over and over and over, throughout the newspaper."<\/p>\n Amen. At least the Dowbrigade and his ilk let you know from the
\n gitgo that we are an opinionated son of a bitch, so take it for what
\n its worth…<\/p>\n <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This morning at the fashionably late hour of 10 am, in the Fenway suite of the Hilton, we attended the Blogger’s Brunch, an official welcome on the part of some of the party joes who are in charge of keeping … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} |