Blogging: Diss-course and Dat-course

I was interviewed by the U.S. correspondent for a big European newspaper the other night for an article on blogging and political discourse in America. Not surprisingly, the trigger for the article and what drew him to me was the S-CHIP debate and saga of Master Graeme Frost.

As I typically do in such interviews, I made a number of overarching statements, generalized like mad and ground my own ax to a surgically fine edge.

Among the points that I made was that any discussion about the merits and demerits of S-CHIP had been pretty much drowned out by a Frankenstein-like monster composed of partisan brickbatting, with the occasional personal attack on the messenger and not the message, and that was a pretty good metaphor for the state of the blogosphere and political discourse in general.

I felt pretty confident in making that assumption. But in the interests of taking a fuller measure of the monster, I reviewed the S-CHIP posts at The Moderate Voice commencing with my October 4 piece on President Bush’s veto and what was likely to happen next. What happened next, of course, was the unanticipated firestorm that erupted after that 12-year-old’s radio remarks on behalf of the Democratic Party.

There were 23 posts in all (not counting cartoons) and 461 reader comments appended to those posts.

The envelope please:

368 posts took a decidedly partisan tack.

78 posts discussed S-CHIP pros and cons.

13 posts attacked the writer.

2 posts praised the writer.

Yer honor, I rest my case.