A Call to Arms: Why Blog?

It's a Beginning

This article, though from the NYT, gets an idea about the purpose and usefulness of blogging.

Instead of a journalist pontificating from afar about bloggers and their inferior roles they play in the media landscape, this article covers the coverage given to the Scooter Libby trial by Firedoglake, a superior liberal blog. I thought this got to the matter at hand: What the hell is blogging and what is it for?

Here's what a Mr. Robert A. Cox, president of the Media Bloggers Association says:

"My goal is to get judges to think of bloggers as citizen journalists who should get the same protections as other journalists get,"

This is where the future is my friends, straight back to the older days when you had a press, you had an opinion:

Even as they exploit the newest technologies, the Libby trial bloggers are a throwback to a journalistic style of decades ago, when many reporters made no pretense of political neutrality. Compared with the sober, neutral drudges of the establishment press, the bloggers are class clowns and crusaders, satirists and scolds.

What can I say? We look around us today and find the old names of newspapers, don't be surprised to find one call a Democrat or Republican. American or even European Press was rooted in partisanship. It was always a tool for informing you and yours. It is also a means of state-control. That is something we must fight with national media in Washington and in our own states.

As Firedoglake puts it:

Ms. Hamsher describes the blog as "a collective watering hole" where contributors with diverse expertise "scour every possible source for information and then pool their resources."

Blogging is not a substitute for journalism, but it is a tool to increase the information for readers and writers and get under the narrative of a established forms of media. Nothing can be more subversive. The rest stems from there.