Add New York Daily News columnist Errol Louis to those who see bloggers as over-caffeinated writers who seemingly look for ways to aggressively promote their favorite candidate and rip apart the candidate they oppose:
There’s a new anti-Obama storyline whipping through cyberspace at the speed of stupid.
Put simply, some Internet nitwits say Obama’s comment that his white grandmother – who made racist remarks and was fearful of blacks – was a “typical white person” just proves he can’t stop alienating white voters.
Never mind that Obama’s point, made casually Thursday on a Philadelphia radio show, was to emphasize the important truth that whites, including his elderly grandmother, are slowly winning the fight to purge their hearts of poisonous prejudices.
That message was swiftly discarded as a gaggle of bloggers and correspondents – whose collective contribution to an honest national dialogue about race has been nil – pounced.
He gives specific examples in his piece to bolster his argument.
Part of what he notices is how blogging is still struggling to find its own identity — and right now due to polarization over the 2008 Presidential race many blogs are at their most passionate best/worst. Because many blogs are closely-aligned to specific candidates, you can see some patterns.
Blogging originally had the potential to create a sea of “citizen journalists” but, in most but not all instances, blogs have evolved into citizen op-ed writers. A good number of blogs are openly fighting the political campaign for their preferred candidates using the same style as political campaigns where an assertion is taken, jumped on and only the part most damaging to the candidate is discussed (or ranted about). You can see this at times on the left, right and…yes…the center.
It may vary, depending on the unstated purpose of the blog. Is it to provide information? Look, analyze and discuss? Or is it to help a candidate win? If it’s the latter, then reading it often becomes akin to watching a campaign spokesman spin on TV.
TIP: Speaking of political advocate bloggers, one of the best, least name-calling pro-Clinton bloggers is Big Tent Democrat at Talk Left. Read his latest.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.