Blogfests
: Here’s a transcript of Friday’s Inside Politics on CNN with lots of bloglove: First, blog reporters talk about what’s happening online (I was surprised to hear them tell my CREEP story); now we have MSNBC and CNN competing to quote blogs and that’s good. Then there’s a good produced piece on bloggers. And then there’s a discussion about blogs between Howard Kurtz and political analyst Stu Rothenberg; rather than right-vs-left, it’s a discussion of clued-in-vs.clueless.
KURTZ: But it’s not like people standing on the street corner. I mean, they now have an effective message delivery system that rivals having a camera here.
ROTHENBERG: It isn’t — yes, but, Howie, look, if CNN — if INSIDE POLITICS is going to do segments on bloggers, they ought to do segments on C-SPAN callers. They have opinions, too. And they may be digging research, and they may have news.
And you ought do segments on poster — people who put up posters on building sites. They have opinions.
KURTZ: There are a lot of bloggers, and they don’t have equal influence. But Trent Lott might still be the Senate majority leader if it were not for bloggers, Dan Rather might possibly still be the CBS anchor and that story might not have gone through the scrutiny. They have a way of inserting into a story and forcing people like us to pay attention, whether we like it or not.
ROTHENBERG: If people at CNN and CBS News are making these decisions on the basis of the bloggers, it seems to me they ought to be — they ought to be embarrassed about it. You know, we don’t know who these people are.
Everybody needs an editor. I’ve always felt so much better when I have an editor, somebody who looks at my copy and tells me, “Have you considered this? Are you sure about this?” I think that’s a big problem with bloggers.
