DNC’s blogging screwup
: Here’s the latest on the DNC’s blogging screwup, in which bloggers were invited and then uninvited (background here): The DNC posts a mealy-mouthed, excuse-riddled, and not altogether credible explanation about the mess.
Bottom line: The DNC screwed up. Big time. They took an opportunity to be the party of the people and transparency and vision and in one swoop became the party of screwups. Nice going, dorks.
The solution is worse than the problem: disinviting bloggers is downright stupid. You should reinivite them. Tell them you ran out of hotel rooms, OK; they’re bloggers; they’ll cope. But now, left out of the party, they will only snipe… and with damned good cause.
And if the RNC has an ounce of sense, which they do, they’ll invite all those disinvited bloggers to their convention. That’ll be great PR, eh, guys?
I’d say this in the comments on the DNC blog… if they allowed comments. What are you afraid of, guys?
If I had applied to go to the convention and had gotten credentials, I would now be threatening to stay away unless the uninvited bloggers were reinvited. Even news organizations — snakey as they can be — would stand together on such principle. So should we bloggers. So I think some of the bloggers who are going should threaten to stay home until those disinvited bloggers are reinvited.
: UPDATE: The story is seeping into mainstream media. CBS Marketwatch just reported on it.
: I won’t buy any excuses from the DNC until I see complete lists of:
1. Bloggers invited
2. Bloggers not invited
3. Bloggers disinvited.
Until then, we cannot know whether this was a matter of slant or space.
We demand transparency. That’s what bloggers do. And we bloggers should be standing together to demand this information — and also to demand that the DNC reinvite the disinvited bloggers. They wouldn’t dare treat mainstream press that way. How dare they treat citizen journalists that way?
And it doesn’t really matter what the cause is. Having f’ed up this badly, the thing to do is to fix it by inviting all the disinvited bloggers to assure that there is no exclusion on any basis and also to reveal the complete lists of bloggers so we can judge the DNC’s process.
: And, by the way, the reason I don’t buy the excuses from the DNC: The number of applicants has nothing to do with the space available. Surely, they sat down at the beginning and decided how many they could let in and what the criteria were. Simple logic.
I just watched a Kerry/Edwards event on WNBC, where the campaign people kept old Gabe Pressman from interviewing ladies in the audience and asked Gabe to turn his camera off. He refused. Good for Gabe. Bad for them.
Transparency, people, transparency! This is the age of transparency.
Let me add that I’m saying all this because I want the party do it this right. It’s a tragedy to muff it up.
