Bloggers star in US presidential race

Bloggers star in US presidential race
SYFI.com India
Monday, 05 July , 2004, 16:14

Wasington: It started as a way to have a cyber-rant or just share a personal thought, but the blogger has become cutting edge media with a role to play even in the US presidential election race.

Sifting through the tens of thousands of blogs, short for web logs, or weblogs, has become a challenge for media and intelligence analysts. But amid the diatribes, commentaries and gossip, bloggers are gaining influence and breaking stories.

Blogging has taken off since the internet boom of the late 1990s. It has gained ground over the past two years as the technology becomes cheaper and easier to handle.

Howard Dean, a former candidate for the Democratic party's presidential nomination, was the first politician to discover the political power of the blog.

He stunned America last year by raising more than seven million dollars over the internet through his blogforamerica.com website. Dean followers spread his word through website blogs and election insiders had to take notice.

"Political campaigns tend to be very active around the margins," said conservative blogger, Bruce Rheinstein, who runs the www.ombudsgod.com website.

"You can affect the elections by getting people on the internet involved, you can have an impact on public opinion and people who might be torn between voting Democratic or Republican or possibly a third party," he said.

For the first time, bloggers will be accredited media at the major party conventions when John Kerry and President George W. Bush will be officially named the Democratic and Republican candidates.

The Democratic Party has decided some of the 15,000 press passes will be assigned to bloggers at its July 26-28 convention. The Democratic National Committee has hired Eric Schnure, a former speechwriter for ex-vice president Al Gore, to handle its own blog.

The Republican National Committee, has not yet chosen an official convention blogger for its conference starting August 30. But spokeswoman Alyssa McClenning said, "Were working on getting them credentials, We'd like to see them here."

"I think they're a great tool because they get people talking about politics and public policy," said Michael Turk, an electronic campaign director for the Bush campaign.

The blog puts a very personal spin on politics.

Bush's own campaign blog included a recent entry that boasts of a Fox News poll where the President is seven points ahead of Democratic rival Kerry. Most show the two neck-and-neck and some put Kerry ahead.

The Bush blog also cites a recent Washington Post editorial that criticizes Kerry for "gloomermongering."

Likewise, Kerry's campaign blog presents its partisan version of the facts.

One headline reads "Supreme Court Lets Cheney Hide Documents," and a written statement beneath said,"The Nixon legacy of secrecy is alive and well in the Bush White House. Americans shouldn't have to rely on court orders to learn what special interest lobbyists are writing White House policies."

Some bloggers are scornful of these campaign blogs saying they are inauthentic.

"They have no personality, they never talk about anything remotely interesting," said blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whose website www.dailykos.com, receives an estimated 104,910 visits a day, according to weblog traffic ratings.

"They are so risk-aversed that they would rather say nothing than say something that might be interesting," Zuniga said of both campaigns blogs.

The liberal blogger has also raised 76,709 dollars for Kerry and hundreds of thousands more for other Democratic congressional candidates. Zuniga points out that unlike most, the Bush campaign blog has no place for public comment.

Most bloggers feel they are the watchdogs of the media and political stories often brew on bloggers websites before they make it into newspapers.

"Stories often bounce around and you get an echo chamber where the top bloggers talk about things," said Peter Daou, a longtime blogger, who now helps write blog entries for John Kerry's campaign website.

"By studying the blog carefully, you can sometimes get a sense of what's coming. They'll telegraph things that are going to come in the future."

Many attribute some of the biggest political news stories to the persistence of bloggers. Bloggers attacked Republican senator Trent Lott's remarks during the 100th birthday party for late senator Strom Thurmond.

Lott praised Thurmond's segregationalist platform when he was a presidential candidate in 1948. Newspapers did not immediately notice the remarks but bloggers kept up the campaign and the outcry eventually forced Lott to resign as Senate majority leader in 2002.

But media critics caution against treating bloggers as real journalists, especially highlighting instances such as reports of an alleged affair between Kerry and an intern Alexandra Polier. Many bloggers were eager to spread the reports.

"It's just the latest manifestation of the vanity press," said Steve Lovelady, managing editor of Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk, that analyzes bloggers as part of its media coverage.

"Most of them don't consider themselves journalists and I'll be the first to tell you that," Lovelady commented.