Live from Blogworld: More Heat than Light
by WonkoSteve
…coming to you from the Blogworld Expo in fabulous La$ Vega$. This three-day extravaganza is an inaugural effort to bring the community of bloggers together in RL. So what happens at a blogging conference? Well, a lot of blogging for one thing. The most popular area as far as I could see was a group of tables in a prime location near two essential blogging amenities: WI-FI antennas and the coffee bar. Every time I checked it was filled with people determinedly pecking at keyboards…and not really talking very much.
Aside from many speeches by the blogeratti, the sessions were largely newbie-focused affairs about how-tos of blogging: How to have an RSS feed, how to keep your blog out of the courtroom, and so on. Of course my interests were mainly with the political blogosphere, but the broad de-focus of the conference made running into any particular kind of blogger a low-probability event. Even the “political track” sessions I saw were not particularly well-attended and took place in huge rooms, meaning you didn’t make too many contacts by meeting people in neighboring seats.
One session, a Thursday afternoon panel ambitiously entitled “Raising the Level of Discourse in the Political Blogosphere,” was a good example. There were maybe 20 people in the audience, in a room meant for about 200. The moderator was Michael Medved of Town Hall. The panelists included Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, Ed Morissey from Captain’s Quarters, and Roger Simon from Pajamas Media representing the conservative sphere, with Jeralyn Merritt of Talk Left and Natasha Chart of Golden Apples representing the liberal sphere.
Two things to note right out of the box. First, if we include Medved in the mix–and we will because he was at least as much a participant as a moderator–the liberals were outnumbered by conservatives two-to-one. Second, there were no representatives of the independent sphere. One would think they’d have something valuable to say about avoiding partisan rancor. Predictably, the panel did little to shed light on the path toward a different or better political conversation.
The discussion mostly focused on grievances one side had against the other. The conservatives, especially Hoft, were upset with the left for using profanity in their posts. Doesn’t this automatically cheapen political rhetoric? Well, the left responded, maybe the right wingers don’t cuss but they do plenty of otherwise nasty things, like for example when Michelle Malkin published personal information about Graeme Frost in the recent S-Chip dust-up. In the larger scheme of things, isn’t that more despicable than using the F-word, the left demanded? Challenged by Chart to condemn Malkin on this one, Medved dodged the question.
And so it went. The panel was mostly an exercise in what the academics call “totalizing rhetoric,” where the transgressions of one person or a small number are generalized to a whole group. They cuss on the Daily Kos, so liberals are all bums. Malkin publishes an address, so the conservatives are all vigilantes. In the end, the panel really did more to reproduce the current problems of political discourse than to explore ideas to raise the bar. Given the way the panel was structured, it was probably an inevitable outcome.
