What Sarah Palin Thinks of Us
By Emily Rutherford - Nov 12th, 2008 at 3:20 pmVia Feministe, Sarah Palin on bloggers:
I’m just going to note that I never blog in my pajamas, that I live a good 2,790 miles away from my parents, and that my parents don’t even have a basement. For the record.
But in a broader sense, I’m guessing that maybe a lot of people are unfamiliar with the new media that are staking out the future of journalism in the 21st century. Governor Palin isn’t the only person who thinks that blogs are these renegade mercenaries that will happily print whatever they like about anything. But the reason that blogs are in many ways eclipsing old-fashioned print and broadcast media is because they are in many cases better and more reliable news sources than the old guard. Everyone–and particularly politicians and other public figures–will have to come to terms with the fact that the future of journalism is changing, pajamas or not.
i think she’s confusing bloggers as a whole with people who play “world of warcraft”…not that there isn’t a healthy overlap, of course…
November 12th, 2008 at 5:20 pmI don’t think the problem is that people don’t take bloggers seriously. After all, Palin’s ire isn’t limited to the blogosphere–she places just as much blame on the mainstream media, which obviously has a lot more credibility with the general public.
The issue here is that the automatic response of Palin and her fellow Christian conservatives to negative coverage is to discredit the sources. Where Palin went wrong in trying to take down bloggers is that she underestimated the extent to which seemingly independent and unaccountable bloggers actually collaborate and form a sort of movement of information. The result was that she ended up looking foolish while bloggers actually proved their worth.
Bloggers don’t have any reason to fear misinformed judgments on their credibility. Since blogs debuted, a natural pecking order has formed so that we now can distinguish between the real bloggers and the hobby bloggers. Those who aren’t savvy on this blog hierarchy are doing so at their own risk–Palin isn’t the first, and she probably won’t be the last, either.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:39 pm