In Sunday’s Washington Post, Michael Shear had a reasonable summary of last week’s blogger conference call with Lt. Governor Tim Kaine. There was one frustrating aside, though:
The cadre of electronic scribes in Virginia whose daily memos to one another fill cyberspace with talk of the 2005 political campaigns emerged from their computerized isolation last week to participate in a telephone news conference with Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, the Democratic candidate for governor.
“Computerized isolation”? Shear’s a good writer and a smart guy — he knows better than to rely on the old internet users as pale-faced basement-dwellers canard. Blogging is so commonplace now that I’ll warrant bloggers represent a genuine cross section of America, or something close to it.
I hope that Mr. Shear will join his compatriots — the Daily Progress‘ Bob Gibson and the Richmond Times Dispatch‘s Jeff Schapiro — at The Summit on Blogging and Democracy in the Commonwealth later this month. He’ll observe among the gathering what I suspect that Gibson and Schapiro already know — Virginia political bloggers are regular folks who are, if anything, more involved with their community than average citizens.
I guess Mr. Shear hasn’t been out enough to know he shouldn’t stereotype and generalize. Otherwise, he’d know better. Of course, it’s in the so-called MSM’s interest to caricature and demonize bloggers. It’s because, in recent years, numerous investigative bloggers have done the jobs so many traditional journalists should have.
I’d comment, but I’m too timid.
Perhaps one day, in the not so distant future, one of us can write this as a report, not a prediction:
The cadre of MSM scribes in Washington whose daily memos to one another fill the pages of anachronistic newspapers with talk of the 2005 political campaigns emerged from their Beltway isolation last week to participate in a telephone news conference with Governor-elect Kilgore, and leaders of the newly-reelected GOP majority from the General Assembly.