Are You People Driving the Media Discourse?
Guerrilla political-news site The Field brings up a weird point about Midterm Fever, or the lack thereof, in this 2010 House/Senate election primer by Al Giordano:
In this sense, a political parody site like Wonkette has become more relevant to the 2010 midterm elections than the entirety of the so-called Netroots, which in 2006 became a kind of kingmaker in the Democrats’ midterm electoral triumphs. I tuned out completely on the Netroots blogs since June and only started browsing them again recently, and its as if they’re stuck on autopilot, still debating “Obama, good or bad” and blissfully disinterested in the midterm elections, certainly compared to where they were in 2006. On the eve of the 2010 elections, they’re still infighting like it’s 2009! Meanwhile, day in, day out, Wonkette is producing wonderful caricature profiles of the insane class of GOP congressional and senate nominees this year, and is actually driving the media discourse about them.
Is thistrue? We hope so! Allah knows we're not doing this exclusively for the Twitter complaints about our beautiful new site design. [ The Field ]
Online discussion forum sites with political stories are the acme ( acne? ) of political discourse nowadays, the sites throw the monsters in the pit meat every few hours and we fight over it, brings a tear to my eye, democracy bitches!
Note to Mr. Giordano: It's not just the congressional and senatorial nominees that feel the sting of the Wonkette snark-lash. The candidates for nomination, especially in Alabama and Tennessee, have gotten enthusiastic attention, too. And yes, from Wonkette's mouth to Rachel's and Colbert's ears and on to the lamestream media, we're driving the shit out of the media discourse.
And when I say "we," I mean both the Prose Pros here and the tipsters and commenters who join the pile-on.
Have you learned anything, Mr. Giordano?