August 20, 2008
Blogs and politics; each gets messy
Maryland voters are gearing up for the most consequential presidential primary in decades - and so are the bloggers, who barely existed the last time there was a presidential primary here.
Blogging and political races seem well-suited for each other, perhaps because at their core, they're both such messy pursuits.
The Maryland political bloggers writing about Tuesday's "Potomac primary" in Maryland, Virginia and Washington aren't as exhaustive as those in the mainstream media. And when news breaks, as it did Thursday with Mitt Romney ending his campaign for the Republican nomination, they're no quicker or more nimble than the blogs on the major news sites. But their inherent snarkiness and informality - in essence what makes a blog a blog - delivers political information in the way a lot of folks think about politics.
When Red Maryland, a conservative blog, offered up its endorsements recently, it broke down how its contributors made their choices (including one who was "anyone but McCain") and published their comments. It was a little more transparent than the united front that newspapers like to project in their political endorsements - even if, behind the scenes, publishers and editorial page editors many times don't see eye-to-eye on politics.
In traditional media, the sausage-making of endorsements is rarely acknowledged or seen, except in a rare case like last week, when Cheryl L. Reed resigned as editorial-page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. She was upset by higher-ups' rewriting - although not changing the outcome - of the paper's endorsements of Barack Obama and John McCain.
Maryland's a blue state, but you'd hardly know that from the blogosphere, where conservative bloggers appear to outnumber those who describe themselves as liberal or progressive.
The blogs also often reveal more about the process of trying to get information than mainstream media typically do.
"John Hawkins, Joy McCann and I just wasted half an hour trying to get into the McCain speech but, even with media credentials, we couldn't," wrote James Joynes in the blog Outside The Beltway. "Something about the fire code. I don't feel too bad: Clarence Page was there getting turned away with us, along with several less notable journalists working for mainstream media outlets. So it goes. I'm back up watching via closed-circuit television."
But when it comes to political information, blogs are still more hors d'oeuvres than main course. Except for the biggest, national ones, they're still largely entities, frequently dogmatic, produced by a person or handful of people in their spare time. I was reminded of that in reading the blog Annapolis Politics the week before the biggest state presidential primary in modern times.
It was taking the week off. As writer Brian Gill noted, "Everyone needs a vacation once in a while, although I do feel odd vacationing from an unpaid job."
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