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January 07, 2008BELTWAY BLOGROLL
Blogging That Makes Me Wanna Cry
What is wrong with bloggers today? Every click I take leads me to some rant that is so loaded with hyperbole and at odds with reality that it is embarrassingly laughable -- and there's video evidence to prove it every time.
First, the big news of the day: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton cried like a baby on the campaign trail -- only she so obviously didn't. As far as I can tell, Clinton shed nary a tear in the episode hyped by the Drudge Report and psychoanalyzed around the blogosphere.
Yes, it was an emotional moment, but I have to wonder if my fellow bloggers (and journalists) are watching the same scene as me. They are desperately trying to manufacture a Howard Dean "scream" or an Edmund Muskie meltdown.
The same sort of thing is happening all over blogdom to start the week:
-- A blogger at RedState accused Republican presidential candidate Duncan Hunter of "angrily proclaiming that 'I got a delegate in Wyoming!' several times" when he interrupted the taping of a Fox talk show. Never happened. Hunter wasn't close to angry. He didn't even emphatically proclaim his victory, and he didn't say it several times.
The video is on RedState for everyone to see, so I'm baffled as to why Leon Wolf so blatantly described it with such inaccuracy. The attack is ironic coming so soon after RedState rightly bashed The Politico for reports on campaign events that are inconsistent with the video evidence.
-- Crooks & Liars jumped all over a report about Fox talker Bill O'Reilly being mean to a staffer for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. But it was at best a he-said, she-said story that hasn't been independently corroborated.
Ann Althouse thinks John Amato of Crooks & LIars, rather than O'Reilly, is the one who is unhinged for overblowing a non-incident. "I am so sick of the way any display of emotional intensity is characterized as a mental disorder."
-- The breathless headline at Americablog, meanwhile, had me convinced that supporters of Republican candidate Ron Paul "chased" another Fox talker, Sean Hannity, all across New York City. "Hannity must have been wetting himself," John Aravosis chortled.
Another ridiculous exaggeration. Yes, Paul's supporters were obnoxious and they badgered Hannity because his network had banned Paul from a debate last night. But their pursuit of and chanting at Hannity was nothing more than a harmless exercise in free speech -- and I seriously doubt that Hannity was anything but annoyed. He just might have been amused by the democracy of it all. I'm pretty sure I saw a smile the only time his face was visible.
After reading all of those posts and comparing the written accounts with the videos, I can't help but conclude that turning to the blogosphere in the heat of the primaries is an utter waste of time. Watching the network news and reading much of the mainstream press isn't much better because reporters are the ones who feed the blogs.
All of the fussing is as pointless, petty and misleading as the nonsense last month over the imagined "floating cross" that Republican Mike Huckabee purportedly inserted into a campaign advertisement. Blogger Joe Carter, a former Huckabee staffer, put that story in the most telling context with this sarcastic jab: "Apparently, a Christmas ad in which the governor mentions 'the birth of Christ' was too subtle. We needed to use a bookcase that looked like a cross so that people would get the point that he was secretly sending a message to Christians."
A year ago, I was right there with everyone else who whined about this year's compressed primary season. Now I'm just glad it will be over soon because the blogging I've seen today is enough to make me cry.
Posted by Danny | 07:46 PM
