Today I am writing from Las Vegas after my first day at the YearlyKos
Convention 2006. I had a full day that even included a little Vegas, dancing my
butt off at a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy concert poolside at the Silverton Lodge
& Casino. Although I could probably blog on forever today, I will keep it
simple and share with you one theme that was dominant at the convention today.
The theme I noted lives somewhere in between the media’s obsession for balance
rather than truth and what Barbara Boxer called the Foxification and the ClearChannelization
of media—netroots are growing, developing, and making a difference where media
has failed.
Take Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was definitely a highlight
at today’s convention. As bloggers are well aware of, we succeeded where
mainstream journalists failed at all stages of this ongoing investigation.
Wilson reminded us of the continuing failure of this story—as it continues to
go underreported and we still don’t know who is responsible for the famous 16
word lie that somehow made it into the State of the Union address. Wilson
provided a simple market analysis for blogs and their significance that echoed
the mornings science panelists, such as Dr. P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula who
suggested we combat the Religious Right’s science hijack at the school board
level, and blogs at scienceblogs.com —blogs are competition for
traditional media and have come to fill the void where the media was absent in
the Wilson family’s story. Although we may still not know why we were lied to,
he encouraged bloggers to keep on telling the truth and left us with a quote
from George Orwell: “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act.”
As the media landscape shifts, bloggers have filled in the
empty spaces with a passion to counter spin, to hold those in power
responsible, and most extraordinarily, to hold modern mainstream media
accountable when they fail. Bloggers ought to keep searching for the truth and
continue posting the truth in the face of lies. Like everyone that came to the
conference this weekend, Barbara Boxer summed up the reason why we all traveled
to the desert by saying that one day, we will look back on this time in our
history and see that it was netroots that
made the difference.
Oh, vicarious thrills. Wish I could be there. Yesterday, I checked dailykos and was noted that CSPAN had the Plamegate segment on. I ran to my TV just in time and was glued to it until the very end.
Please, I want details. Hi to all the people there. I feel like they are family. What did you chat about. Who did you hug? Details, Baby, details.
Posted by: Arlyn | June 10, 2006 at 09:14 AM