It's pretty rare that a press reporter understands the dynamics of political blogs online. In the San Francisco Chronicle today there's a story about YKos that is a refreshing change of pace. Actual fair and balanced reporting! Here's some snips but I highly recommend reading the whole thing:
Another sign of the growing power of the Daily Kos convention is that none of the attending Democratic hopefuls -- including Sens. Barack Obama and Chris Dodd, former Sen. John Edwards and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson -- are scheduled to appear at the Democratic Leadership Council gathering this weekend in Tennessee. The DLC is the moderate organization that former President Bill Clinton led for two years before beginning his successful campaign for the White House in 1992.
"It's hilarious that (Hillary Clinton's) not even attending her own group," said Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the Berkeley resident who founded Daily Kos in 2002, and whose nickname, "Kos," supplies the moniker for the blog where 500,000 regularly visit.
There's a nice photo of Kos at the sfgate site :)
On Friday, the Republican National Committee sent reporters a set of YearlyKos talking points with a headline that read, "Democrat Candidates Plan Panderfest To 'Liberal Partisans' At YearlyKos Convention."
Has anybody seen this list???
And conservatives don't have anything quite like the Daily Kos blog, either. There are highly popular conservative blogs, like MichelleMalkin.com and Instapundit.com. But analysts say the Daily Kos functions more like a community, where liberal smack-talk, tips and strategy are traded and underreported stories are tipped.
Someone finally gets that it's NOT just he said/she said. That the difference is fundamental in it's structures.
The downside to this notoriety is that YearlyKos' visibility has made it a target for the right. Earlier this month on his Fox News show, O'Reilly pointed to some of the thousands of comments posted on Daily Kos, like "the pope is a primate," as evidence of "one of the worst examples of hatred America has to offer" and compared the blog's commentators to the Ku Klux Klan.
He then criticized the conference's lone corporate sponsor, JetBlue, for sponsoring the comments -- even though the airline doesn't sponsor the blog, which is where the comments appear; rather it offered 10 round-trip voucher tickets to the convention to give to speakers in exchange for placing the airline's logo on the convention Web site.
This is the first time in two weeks that I've seen a MSM report that makes the distinction between YKos and DailyKos. I don't know why I'm particularly stuck on that one distintion except that it indicates to me the shallow sloppiness of reporting generally. Anyway, read the article...
http://www.sfgate.com/...