Welcome! Log in or register to comment on the blog posts you see here, or even write your own blog post! Find out how to use this site, and join the conversation today!
The following is a joint statement from Adam Pagnucco, Dan Reed, and me.
Recently, an anonymous blog appeared targeting Montgomery County Council Member Mike Knapp. The sole purpose of this blog was to attack Mr. Knapp's character in an effort to discourage him from running for County Executive . We will not do the author a favor by linking to his work. The issue for us is not Mr. Knapp or his fitness for office. Rather, the creation of this blog, which is neither the first nor the last of its kind, calls a question of vital importance to Maryland 's blogosphere. And this is our response.
All of us blog under our own names. We do it because we believe what we say. We do it because we are willing to stand behind our words. And we do it because we do not fear accountability from our readers. In fact, transparency and accountability are good for the blogosphere. They are the primary tools by which our still young, and occasionally unruly, medium can be improved.
Unfortunately, our medium is subject to abuse by those who attempt to destroy the reputation of others while hiding behind a veil of anonymity. By spreading incorrect and possibly libelous information, anonymous attack bloggers do a disservice to legitimate bloggers and to the community as a whole.
While we may disagree on some matters, we agree on the fact that these anonymous attackers discredit the blogosphere and political activism as a whole. For the good of our craft, our readers and the public discourse, we the undersigned stand against them and condemn their work. Specifically, the creator of the anonymous blog attacking Mike Knapp should either have the courage to identify himself or herself or have the decency to delete the blog. Dan Reed is the author of Just Up the Pike. Eric Luedtke is a contributor to Free State Politics. Adam Pagnucco is a contributor to Maryland Politics Watch. As measured by Sitemeter, Just Up the Pike, Free State Politics and Maryland Politics Watch are three of the five most-read blogs in the state of Maryland .
Few organizations at the state level in Maryland have seen the benefits of blogs enough to start doing targetted media outreach to us, but the supporters of the Purple Line are among them. They're personally inviting blog readers to sign their online petition:
The Purple Line Now coalition is launching an on-line petition. The aim is to show the breadth of support for building the Purple Line as light rail from New Carrollton to Bethesda.
I posted yesterday about the Maryland Politics Watch series on the Gazette, which is the most popular story they've had over there in a long time. Adam Pagnucco's a nice guy, and while he criticized their labor policy, he never said anything about their journalism or past accusations about right wing pro-business bias.
So I was a little surprised to read this ham-handed little bit of biased retaliation. Background: Adam Pagnucco works for the carpenter's union, and for a while now his union has been advocating for a prevailing wage law in Montgomery County. This past week, the County Council finally passed the law by an overwhelming majority. But if you read through the Gazette article about it that I linked to above, you'll notice the following:
- It provides information entirely on one side of the issue. It describes a number of different anti-prevailing wage talking points, and only mentions the arguments for the bill in the context of a single quote, buried more than halfway through the article.
- It quotes four opponents, and only one supporter. One of the opponents quoted is Anthony O'Donnell, who doesn't even live in Montgomery County.
- Nowhere does the Gazette even attempt to describe the point of view of the carpenters union, a major supporter of the bill. But it does find the space to print this quote, from the head of Montgomery County's anemic Republic Party, effectively arguing against both the prevailing wage law and any other wage-related laws like the minimum wage, the living wage law, and the equal pay act:
"The marketplace should govern wages and employee and employer relationships,"
In other words, it's what you would expect to see in a press release from the Republican Party or the National Federation of Independent Business, not from a newspaper claiming to journalistic neutrality. I can't imagine it was intended as anything except retribution against Adam and his union for his having had the gall to question the Gazette's business model. Although I guess you could make the case that the Gazette was just biased to begin with, and that the above quote is simply their reaction to Adam's criticism of what they pay their employees. And the stupid part is, it's bad for business. Montgomery and Prince George's County are two of the Gazette's prime markets, and a lurch to the right is not exactly going to boost their readership among the vast majority of people there who are Democrats.
If this continues, it may be time to begin treating the Gazette like we treat Fox News, and demand that Democratic elected officials no longer speak to Gazette reporters.
Adam Pagnucco over at MPW has another great investigative blogging series up (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Follow-up on salaries), this time about financial problems and consequent staffing cuts at the Gazette newspapers. The Gazette is the dominant local paper in Montgomery, Prince George's, Frederick, and Carroll Counties, and as such is a fairly influential media outlet. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you've probably followed a link from one of my postings to a Gazette story. So it hurts the community when a key news source is being downsized, and Adam documents the specifics about the economic problems at the Gazette, and how they're trying to balance their books on the backs of their reporters.
It's caught the attention of someone in the Gazette management, though, because they've starting commenting anonymously about how great a workplace the Gazette really is, and about how bloggers are all biased buffoons. Fact is, the way news is delivered IS changing. Blogs have provided a new source of news, one which is much more responsive to the needs of readers. The Gazette can't be a portal for discussion of state and local politics from both the liberal and conservative perspective. Which is why sites like Red Maryland, Free State Politics, and Maryland Politics Watch exist. And as a newspaper with two releases a week, it can't respond to stories as rapidly as the blogs. But the Gazette and papers like it are still essential for their teams of full-time employees who can seek out stories in a way that local bloggers can't, because we have full-time jobs of our own. So it'll be sad if mismanagement, mistreatment of workers, or market forces lead to a further weakening of the Gazette, whether or not the editorial page continues to align itself with the business wing of the Republican Party.
That said, it begs pointing out the irony that in saying that blogs don't report real news, the anonymous Gazette management commenter was insulting his or her own parent newspaper, the Washington Post. The Post runs a huge number of successful news blogs on its website, including blogs on local and state politics, like Maryland Moment, and prominent national blogs, like Chris Cillizza's The Fix.
Peter Franchot has a blog up now. So far, it's nothing more than what goes out over his e-mail list. It'll be interesting to see if they use it as an effective campaign / candidate blog, or if it's another weak attempt by a politician to have an online presence, without putting in the effort to create a real one.
MoeLane reports this problem, which is going to impact a lot of people here in Maryland:
If you have sitemeter and us Internet Explorer, they are not working together and will not allow you to get into your blog. What it also means that I cannot read any blogs with sitemeters on them. THIS is a HUGE problem in blogspot land right now. What you do is: go to blogspot.com log in get to your dashboard then layouts remove sitemeter....
I had the same problem loading my blog in IE (I usually use Firefox) and it did work after removing the Sitemeter Code. Don't know what that's all about, but I wonder if it's somehow tied into this spam issue. Problematically, I seem to be having issues publishing to my server at the moment (I'm not hosted on blogspot) this is just a bad day all around for everybody:
There's a spate of political blogging sites being flagged as spam blogs on the widely used Google software tool Blogspot. One of the sites that has been locked out is our arch-nemesis Red Maryland, but it's a nationwide problem and affecting sites on both ends of the political spectrum. It won't affect Free State, because Isaac runs this site on different software. No sense yet whether it's a software glitch or some sort of petulant partisan back and forth flagging, but in the mean time people will have to depend on the traditional media for their local political news in a lot of places. Good luck to Red Maryland on getting everything up and running again.
I missed the time window for commenting on Native Son's 27Jun diary A Modest Blogging Proposal, hence this diary. First I will note that the link to Colorado Pols needs to be fixed - removing the text string 'freestatepolitics.us' from the embedded URL in the original diary should fix it.
On the actual subject of the diary, having a "blog of common ground" managed jointly by folks of varying political stripes is a good idea in principle, and occasionally works, as the Colorado blog seems to illustrate (minor nit to pick - based on a cursory read-through, I would not describe that blog as "nonpartisan" but rather "bipartisan", or even "polypartisan" if they let in Libertarians, Greens, and other "third party" participants.)
For this sort of thing to work, the folks who set it up and run it have to trust one another, and establish and strongly enforce guidelines for posting, especially in regard to what constitutes abusive language - generally, though not always, self-evident - and irrelevance, e.g., permitting long diatribes from 9/11 Truthers on a state politics blog will likely drive readers away. Again, the trust thing is important - the folks running the show have to come to terms on the goals of the blog and the rules for posting, constantly monitor the blog, and stay in touch with each other with sufficient regularity to quickly resolve disputes before they become flame wars. Such conflagrations have been known to turn once good blogs into charred embers (to continue with the tortured analogy).
I've never run a blog, but I've read enough of them to know how much work they are for the proprietors of even single-issue sites, let alone sites where a few hotheads with different world views can really stir the pot. There are a few sites out there that make it work - a national-level one is Obsidian Wings, which has kept going even with changes in its group proprietorship over the years, with only a few changes in the strictly enforced posting rules required during that time (fyi, my favorite poster there is Hilzoy, who is a Philosophy prof. at Johns Hopkins). On the other hand, I couldn't see this working on any large scale in the toxic miasma of, say, Texas state politics, whose once kinda-sorta bipartisan environment was replaced some years ago with the demon child hatched by Tom Delay and Satan (Karl Rove was the midwife, I think).
If the would-be proprietors of a bi/polypartisan Maryland blog know each other in RL - say, as students who cross paths at college - it would probably increase the odds of such a thing working, since it's harder to sustain dark, lurid fantasies about your political opponents (and potential blog partners) when you can see that they are regular, decent folk in RL. Given some of the contentious matters facing Maryland, especially tough budget/taxation decisions, that sort of comity becomes even more important in keeping lines of communication open.
Apropos of my post from yesterday, Marc Steiner's blog is fascinating reading. In particular I'd like to associate myself with his thoughts on Barack Obama's speech on race Tuesday:
We live in a nation where race has always been at the root of our social and political discussion. Race is at the root of our national persona. It is complex, very complex. Our generation, our race, our region, our gender, and our exposure other races define our feelings and sense of race as a nation. Barak Obama clearly understands the complexity of race in America. My own sense of him is that growing up as a Black child raised by a socially and politically open white mother, with conservative white grandparents in a white world, with an African father whom he did know, defined his own search for racial identity in America. He lived in other cultures and saw race not just through the lens of Black and White but through Asian worlds that most non-Asian-Americans ever touch. This is a life journey that took him, and continues to take him, wrestling with race through all its American complexities.
America needs to have this conversation with itself. Maybe Barak Obama is the only one, at the moment, who is able to create this conversation among ourselves.
And here's Obama's speech itself for good measure:
I have a soft spot for the Washington Post, despite the various heresies of their editorial page on issues I care about, like, for instance, whether teachers deserve to be paid. Soft spot aside, I think they've been smart to embrace blogs on their website, and Maryland Moment is smack dab in the middle of my favorites list. But it's interesting to me that they haven't taken off in the way I expect they would. Post reporters have access to news stories and newmakers beyond what any volunteer blogger can muster. And yet, their comments pages are often slim on reader responses (as are ours, I'll admit).
So here's my little note of assistance to the Post (who I'm certain don't read this blog): The WashingtonPost.com's loose policy on comments means they have less reader feedback than Ficker feedback. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, Robin Ficker is the most annoying man in Montgomery County, and perhaps the universe. He's run for Montgomery County executive a dozen times or so, one of those perennial ego candidates that makes you question democracy. So Maryland Moment is periodically plagued by some mildly delusional comment from Ficker, and, when someone steps up to disagree with him, a dozen really obvious sockpuppets pop up to support Ficker. Geeky lingo warning: a sock puppet is a false identity created by a user to submit comments supportive of themselves of their ideas under the pretense of being a third party.
Or, to better understand what I mean, look here. 1. Ficker states his support for a wingnut candidate for the council special election. 2. A couple other commenters call Ficker an idiot. 3. Not one, not two, but six consecutive comments with fairly obviously made up names follow, all in support of Ficker's guy. One even calls the real commenters the KKK. Because, you see, it's racist to dislike Robin Ficker, who's whiter than whipped cream. And bizarrely, Ficker often uses Hispanic names when creating these sock puppets.
Point is this: if the Post wants to create a real online community that allows actual debate on their blogs, they're going to have to go after the Robin Fickers of the world. They'll need to look at banning users who create sock puppets. Whether they care to do that, or have the savvy, is another question. But until then, their attempt at replicating real blogging communities is going to completely stall out.
