Thursday, February 8, 2007

The Comet has Arrived!

No, we're not talking about the Marty Levine C-P cover story about the blurghosphere. We are far more gratified to appear in the one political blog that Levine somehow snubbed: Delano's Den!

We tried to defend the honor of bloggery, but to little avail. The current KDKA poll shows 64% of respondents think blogs are "just a lot of hot air on the web," which is kind of embarrassing, since its an Internet poll!!!

Jon's new post actually opens an interesting subject: Is the media politically biased? He cops to three "institutional" biases: dramatization, personalization, and authority / incumbency. We would respectfully add a fourth: the bias against exposing patent nonsense, for fear of losing access, or alienating part of one's audience.

Jon defends the media for covering "both sides of the story." Yet how many times have we heard the report, "Smith tells us that the sky is blue, whereas Jones insists that the sky is plaid with blond highlights. Fascinating contrasts. We'll find out who's right in November!"

As to the Den, we are forced to holster our snark-gun, and admit this venture shows some potential. We offer a few suggestions:

1. More updates. If you don't show some new content a few times a week, people forget you exist.

2. Respond to your commenters. If you're lucky, you might find yourself in a flame-war, or even a bona-fide feud! The Comet would be happy to volunteer, you son of an English k'nigit.

3. Make your space appear at least a little different from the rest of KDKA's website. In the blurghosphere, it's always Casual Friday. Try adding a simple graphic novel!

In regards to the City Paper piece, we actually would like to register a quibble. We were clumsily paraphrased in one of the last paragraphs. The Comet detests the phrase "knowledge workers" -- we imagine it takes a lot more knowledge to operate a lathe, or install ceiling tile, than it does to design new packaging for Go-Gurt. In drawing distinctions between the candidates' bases of support, we do recall having uttered words like "wired," "progressive," "traditional," and possibly "yinzers." We are appreciative that the City Paper sacked Marty for his shoddy work.

1 comment:

  1. You are in fine, strong company. Also commenting below you: The Mayor of the Boro of Pennsbury Village! Huzzah!

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