I always thought that the goal of the blogosphere was to raise the political dialog in our nation. To fill in the gaps where the mainstream media has failed. And, in general, we've done a pretty good job. We helped lead the charge and made the War the issue in 2006. We stood behind Chris Dodd and his fight against retroactive immunity.
But on one level, we have failed. When checking the blogs versus the mainstream media coverage of the Democratic Primaries, I honestly can't tell the difference.
Case in point. The recent blowup about race.
As the media overblow and overcovered some rather innoccous comments about Race, we here at the blogosphere stood by and did the exact same thing.
From the reccomended diaries...
Have the Clintons Surrogates Reduced Themselves to "Race Baiting"?
The dark heart of the Clinton campaign: a strategy designed to make race THE issue
Obama's Playing the Race Card Will Destroy his own "Hopes"
Versus the MSM's great reporting in articles likes...
Obama, Race and the Presidency
Why the Clintons Play the Race Card
Hillary Pulls Race Card and Obama May Fold: Margaret Carlson
Can you tell the difference?
I can. We are less reliant on facts, more inflamatory, and far more biased than the MSM.
But that's not the point of this article. No offense to any of the bloggers I linked to up there, and there have been plenty of great bloggers writing about how we have overblown this conflict, and others focusing on the real issues of race and gender.
But we have failed in a different way, we have failed to raise the dialog, failed to move beyond horserace coverage, and failed to throughly vet each of the candidates and his or her stances on the issues.
For example, the economy is on the doldrums, and numerous candidates have released economic stimulus packages. The mainstream media has ignored these packages, and the blogosphere, well, I've yet to see a detailed analysis of each candidates economic plan. Where do I turn? I would write one myself, but I'm certainly no economist.
We need to stop worrying about the horserace, stop recommending diaries that are nothing more than wire stories, and once again cover what the MSM won't, what really matters to America. We need to set the dialog for the fall, where I hope the main issues on everyone's mind will be the economy, the war in Iraq, and the looming Climate Change crisis. I will be blogging on the latter, making sure people realize what a threat climate change is. What about you?
Will we fulfill our role, or will we continue to let Chris Matthews, Wolf Blizter, and Lou Dobbs set the narratives? Good god I hope so.