Now that the fury over Saddam's capture has calmed a bit, it's time to figure out what's really going on. And to do that, Christopher Lydon's Blogging of the President is holding its second blog burst at
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000087.html#000087. (The first blog burst for the Blogging of the President was on
the internet and politics, with the resulting conversation archived
here.)
Clearly, everyone's talking about Saddam Hussein, so I have to guide the conversation more narrowly this time or else I'll have to link the whole internet. So here's the question, with some background: The Tet offensive in Vietnam is widely considered a terrible loss for the Vietnamese in purely military terms, but a dramatic political victory that led to America's ultimate withdrawal because it turned the media and the American public against the war. Does the capture of Saddam Hussein bear a sort of 'anti-Tet' moniker, cooling the increasingly powerful (yet still minority status) anti-war narrative? And what does the proliferation of blogs and foreign news sources mean for the media cycle around the capture of Saddam Hussein? Is his capture more or less 'spinnable', and who's doing the spinning?
Well we want the blogosphere to answer these questions. Specifically, by this Friday.
So, we're collecting blog posts, observations and essays on that question for publication this Friday. If you write on the rather broad topic of a democratized media and its reaction to such a hugely shocking symbol, we'll link to it. If you want to publicize this to the people who read your site, we'd be much obliged, as a bigger conversation is more interesting. The link to publicize is here:
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/000087.html#000087
So, if you have something to say on the topic, comment in the post below, email me at matt@bopnews.com with your thoughts, or just send us at info@bopnews.com a link to your blog.
best,
Matt Stoller
The Blogging of the President
www.bopnews.com