Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

In an act of compassionate brilliance, United State Congress ordered blood transfusions from steroid using baseball players into the brain-damaged Terry Schiavo. “It is the American Way, and darned good sportsmanship too, for the super strong to care for the super weak,” declared a congressman from New Mexico.

In a related story, weakened by high fuel prices, SUV owners stood vigil and prayed for government passage of a large oil transfusion from the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge.

Steven Levy’s recent Newsweek article covering a Harvard conference on blogs points out a quote attributed to Keith Jenkins. Jenkins wrote, “My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere… will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one.” Additonal fears were expressed by female bloggers. I suppose Harvard will always be the target of these kind of slings, until there is no longer is a Harvard.

I am relatively new to blogging, and not a big media player, so I do not share Jenkin’s concerns. My own first discovery in exploring blogging was Beccary, which turns out to be a wonderful young Asian woman’s web site. I enjoy her work and what she communicates, period. Nothing to do with race or gender.

Dragging race and gender preference into blogging stinks of professional paranoia and the claims of ownership that are the lifeblood of professional organizations and associations. Jenkins is a professional photojournalist. In a world where everyone is a photographer and more and more are bloggers, most likely defending territory is part of his survival story.