The Joys of Being Politically Neutral on a Blog
Political digression: I’ve got Wesley Clark supporters all excited because of my coverage of one of his New Hampshire events this weekend. They think I’m supporting him. Now, I’ve got a Howard Dean supporter claiming I’m a Dean supporter and giving me something that looks like an electronic kiss or whistle (I’m not good at interpretting punctuation faces). hee hee hee
Do you know who I’m really supporting? Are you sure? See, that’s my point. I’m not going to say it on this blog. If I make a decision and tell you about it, you’ll think that everything that I’ve written is biased in one way or another, consciously or subconsciously. I lose credibility as a reporter of the political events I attended and reported in the past and anything I write in the future will also lack credibility. Why do I want to jeopardize that?
Also, I don’t want to alienate my readers by talking about certain sensitive subjects like politics, religion, and a few more things that aren’t directly related to news librarianship and having them drop my blog because they don’t agree with me on that topic.
Besides, this isn’t an appropriate forum for this kind of discussion. You may have noticed that I’ve labeled my political reports as diversions or digressions. If you’re here to read about news librarianship and you don’t want to read about politics, skip the digressions and diversions. I’m still writing about librarianship. I’m just doing political reports to cater to some of my blog readers who have lamented not knowing much about the candidates from sources other than the main stream media and to play with Dave Winer’s idea that blogging politics is important.
December 23rd, 2003 at 11:55 am
I was *trying* to be funny by saying you were supporting a particular candidate when you specifically said you weren’t. I guess it didn’t work.
December 23rd, 2003 at 12:29 pm
First of all: Oh my gosh! Jay McCarthy commented on my blog instead of writing his own blog post about it! (He’s a big proponent for people having their own blogs so they can interact with other bloggers that way instead of commenting on other people’s blogs.)
Oh. I get it. ha ha ha
Sarcasm/humor in the blog environment (and trying to get it to work). I wondered if you were trying to crack a joke in cyberspace. I’m a little edgy ’cause I really don’t want people to think I’m for one candidate over another on my blog ’cause I really am trying to be mysterious about who I’m supporting and honest in my reports about campaign events. And I wrote that post with a slight touch of sarcasm that never comes through on my blog. <sigh> I’ve got to work on that.
I am enjoying reading how people interpret my reports, though. I wonder how many of them are projecting their own preferences onto what they’re reading. I haven’t read any of Gephardt’s people saying I support him or Lieberman people saying I’m all for Joe. We’ll see what happens.