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September 15, 2006
Liberal Bloggers: More Mainstream Than You Think
This week's Now program focused on liberal bloggers. The newest information for me in the piece was that I pronounce Daily Kos wrong. It's not "cos" as in "cost," it's "coas" as in "coast." Huh. I knew it came from the guy's name (Markos) but I never put two and two together. I also didn't know he was a refugee from the civil war in El Salvador (a war courtesy of US military and corporate intervention).
The meat of the piece was thing you'd know if you read the blogosphere: most bloggers are middle-aged, married, with kids. They're not radical, they're just political junkies. And Daily Kos is 100% focused on domestic politics.
Here's what's wrong with this picture: the mainstream media aint tellin you about world affairs and neither are the most widely read blogs. They might talk about the political infighting around so-called homeland security, but they wont tell you that there is no war on terror, there's just fearmongering. No one, generally, is communicating with activists around the world in either the mainstream media or the mainstream blogosphere.
Watching the segment got me riled up. Made me realize that it's acceptable that I spend a lot of time doing my work as the Program Chair of WILPF US, but that it's vital for me to take time out of that work to blog so that people outside the 20 or so who know about the oldest women's peace organization in the world can hear about our work and the reality of the world.
The other segment of Now was on the corruption in the Interior Department. Interior's Inspector General brought up the same point Molly Ivins did in her book, Bushwacked (which I'm currently reading, several years late). That is that when you put the chief lobbyist for the coal industry in the 2nd most powerful position for protecting our public lands, the results wont be so great. We're so lucky that he resigned. Of course, you don't need a coal lobbyist in place to make bad decisions - incompetency will do the trick just as well; like the 1000 or so contracts written during Clinton's administration that doesn't make energy producers pay royalties when pumping gas and oil out of public lands. Thank you, public servants, for defrauding the American people out of $10 billion!
"Blog The Vote" - this week's Now on the net
Posted by cj at September 15, 2006 11:34 PM
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