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Blog Bits

The head of Michigan's Democratic Party said he and his colleagues are "proud to be the first state party in the nation to host a Bloggers Caucus at our state conventions" -- whatever that means. Richard Burr, who writes for the politics blog of the Detroit News, thinks it's a bad idea.

"Michigan Democratic Party Chairman Mark Brewer is trying to corrupt and compromise liberal bloggers by getting them signed up as party members and giving them their own party caucus," Burr wrote. He added, "[W]hen bloggers get their own Democratic Party caucus, they are nothing more than party toadies, a registered special-interest group that happens to masquerade as opinion writers."

-- The first client of Republican new media consultant David All, the Majority Accountability Project, will be a curious (and very un-Washington) cross breed of GOP activism achieved by expose-the-Democrats investigative journalism.

From the press release: "MAP will be the premiere information resource on the House majority and conduct its own investigative stories not being done by the mainstream media or the liberal-dominated Internet news services. MAP will compile and maintain comprehensive reports on members of the majority, such as House votes, campaign financing, district activities, policy positions and public statements."

-- Democratic Internet consultant Kari Chisholm visited Five Brothers, the new campaign blog being written by the five sons of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and learned that Romney is paying students a commission on funds they help raise for the campaign.

Chisholm said via e-mail that the practice is professionally unethical. "Mitt Romney is training the next generation of GOP fundraisers to be unethical and sleazy. Unbelievable."

-- Asian American journalists don't want blogs (and other media) reporting the fact that the Cho Seung-Hui, the young man who killed 32 people and them himself at Virginia Tech on Monday, is an Asian.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News responded by saying "Asian" as many times as he could. The condescending tone in a release from the Asian American Journalists Association -- "the standards of news reporting should be universal and applied equally, no matter the platform or medium, including blogs" -- might have had something to do with his reaction."

-- Blogs are part of "America's Golden Age of media" and a good argument against imposing new limits on media ownership, according to Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

-- Blogging in Egypt "has evolved within the past year from a narcissistic parlour sport to a shaper of the political agenda. By simply posting embarrassing video footage, small-time bloggers have blown open scandals over such issues as torture and women's harassment on the streets of Cairo." (Hat tip to Instapundit.)

-- The interviewer becomes the interviewed: Ed Morrissey started his tenure as the political director of BlogTalkRadio this week with a "get" for his own CQ Radio show. Howard Kurtz, the media critic for The Washington Post and the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," was the guest. You can listen to Morrissey's interview with Kurtz here.

A top presidential campaign aide to Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, was the guest on another BlogTalkRadio show hosted by two Virginia Democrats. Those two bloggers, Lowell Feld and Ben Tribbett, also have signed a deal to write a book called "Netroots Rising."

-- Who's fighting on today's media battleground? It's the "digital utopians of Silicon Valley" against the journalistic "bourgeoise," of course. At least that's what Andrew Keen, the author of a forthcoming book called "The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture," thinks.

Posted by Danny | 09:34 AM

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