Wow, who knew that it would be so difficult to invite state-level bloggers to cover the Democratic National Convention? It started out well, with the DNC deciding to credential a blog for each state and territory and grant them unprecedented convention access. That’s a brilliant idea and one that I doubt anybody could complain about (except maybe the traditional media). But it looks like there wasn’t enough thought put into the process. Whether this was out of a lack of foresight or something else, I’m inclined to think the former, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t mistakes made and that some of the decisions made were very questionable at best.
There are two major complaints about the selections made: the lack of diversity and the apparent fact that some blogs were chosen over more qualified competitors based on questionable criteria or insider “vetoes.”
The overwhelming majority of the 54 state/territory blogs are run by straight white males. While it is difficult to come up with an exact number, since many bloggers don’t publicly identify themselves by demographic characteristics. Part of the problem, at least from what I can tell, is that bloggers who aren’t straight white males are less likely to blog about state politics and are more likely to write about national and social issues. Since the people who chose the state blogs were interested in state politics as the topic of the blogs that were chosen, that presents a problem. I’m not sure, though, that this is a legitimate criteria for choosing blogs to attend the national convention. Is the blogger coverage meant to be about state politics, or is it meant to be coverage of national politics meant to be delivered to local audiences? Seems to me it’s the latter, which means that this criteria doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’d also suggest that, much like Florida did with its delegate selection plan, an affirmative action plan would’ve been a good idea. Hopefully, most of this will be remedied in the general blogger pool selections that are forthcoming. If not, then the Democratic Party will have created a much larger problem with this process than it was seeking to solve by granting access. Don’t forget we’re talking about bloggers, people who write about the things that piss them off, particularly when it appears to be based on identity (or based on ignoring people’s identity.
The Francis L. Holland Blog — Jim Crow Blogging at the Democratic National Convention?
African American Political Pundit — Black bloggers to the back of the bus!
Pam’s House Blend — Democratic National Convention state blog selection dustup.
In the other instance, a number of high quality blogs — Cotton Mouth, Left in Alabama, the Albany Project, BlueJersey, Michigan Liberal — failed to get the invite while other blogs, rightly or wrongly, were chosen despite being nonpartisan, nonactivist, nonprogressive or owned by the media. Some accounts suggest local Democratic Party officials vetoed some of these (and maybe others) and chose blogs that gave them more favorable coverage instead. I don’t know about that one way or the other, but if it did happen, it’s certainly wrong. Who gives Democrats worse coverage than Fox News? They get a credential. But blogs written by diehard progressive Democrats don’t? If we want our blogs to be run top-down, without criticism, then we’ll end up with the nonexistent Republican blogosphere. We don’t want that, however, because it is useless. The whole reason that the Democratic/progressive blogs are so successful is because they have freedom to tell the truth. Refusing to give credentials to blogs that tell the truth is a bad idea and a bad precedent. Hopefully these mistakes will be remedied relatively quickly. I understand that seating/space is limited, but there are a few of these blogs (at least those noted above) that should be not only invited to the convention, but given full floor access as well. We should be rewarding bloggers who are doing the job of both the traditional media and of the political party itself, when it comes to helping get out the party message to new audiences and helping get candidates election.
Cotton Mouth — Cotton Mouth Is Not Going To The Democratic Convention (And Why).
Open Left — Clamping Down on Blog Dissent: More Evidence of State Blogger Problems.
Open Left — State Parties Nixing State Blogs from the Convention?
Awesome topic!!
The blogger corps is part of the Democratic National Convention Committee’s (DNCC) commitment to engage a broad spectrum of audiences during the party’s National Convention. Governor Dean notified the blogs selected via an online video message available at http://www.DemConvention.com.
From the very first meetings, the managers of FPC have been concerned with recruiting a diverse pool of bloggers and contributors. In many respects, we were successful. The FPC is not entirely made up of straight white males, but it is fair to say that this demographic is overrepresented among us, (in comparison to the general population).
There are women and gay men in our ranks, but we haven’t done as well in attracting people of color to participate. Blacks and Latinos make up sizable segments of our state’s population, yet we have not made as much progress with recruitment within these demographics.
As one of the managers, I’ve looked for ways in which we could establish a community more representative of Florida’s diverse population. This has been a harder task than one might imagine.
Online activists and bloggers concerned with state politics are a tiny percentage of the general population–a percentage that is skewed by access to technology, socio-economic constraints, educational opportunities and other considerations. Bloggers are just not very representative of the population in general.
There is an inbuilt selection bias when trying to establish an online community. It is difficult to find bloggers among one’s everyday encounters in society. Blogs are found by following links on the internet, or by data-mining the various search-engines and directories. Incoming links determine search-engine placement. The true importance of a blog is often masked by some arbitrarily determined metric, i.e. pagerank.
If it were easier to find bloggers of color in Florida, I think the community, as a whole, would be better served.
We aren’t easily going to find these bloggers by scouring the blogrolls of predominantly white-male bloggers, or by trusting in the metrics assigned by Google. We need to crowd-source this task, aggregate the results, and promote those bloggers by linking to them. To this end, I propose that the FPC start building a directory of progressive minority bloggers in our state.
Great article, Kenneth! In fact, the discriminatory die was cast as soon as they decided that:
(1) there would only be ONE state blog on the floor from each state, and
(2) that blog would be chosen based on traffic, and
(3) only blogs that mostly covered state party issues would be eligible.
These criteria were carefully written with effect (if not intent) of including some blogs categorically while categorically excluding others, particularly Black and Latino blogs.
Since the most-trafficked blog in each state would (just like the majority population of each state), be a white blog targeting primarily white people, therefore this criterion automatically excluded virtually all Black blogs before any application were received. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to predict that the most trafficked blogs in virtually all states would be white blogs.
And, as pointed out, there doesn’t seem to be any rational relationship between the “state blog” -oriented criteria and the goal of informing and mobilizing all key constituencies, many of them concerned with national issues like the war and the economy, to vote in November.
I certainly hope the DNC will announce forthwith that all constituencies in every state will be represented among the blogger corps on the floor, because a virtually all-white floor bloggers corps, and the inevitable all-white group pictures that will go along with it, are going to be an immense embarrassment to the Party, as well as insulting and alienating key constituencies like Blacks and Latinos.
Because the Party needs our constituencies’ votes to win the electoral college in November, that ought to be good enough reason to have someone from our blogs in each state on the floor of the Convention, and reporting back to essential constituencies.
It’s not to late to fix this near utter lack of floor blogger diversity before we advertise this mess on national television for a full week in August. We need to fix this before it detracts from the Convention and our chances to win in November.