Miss two days and what happened? Not much. There is a rather self-congratulatory (or perhaps, in the parlance of the blogosphere, community-congratulatory) post at DD about the role of bloggers in the election and how the MSM just doesn't get it(!). I live under no such illusions and rather suspect quite well that the professional news media actually do get it. Bloggers in this election are as irrelevant as, well, vloggers. [Ed.: remember vlogging? That was great.]
You know, turfing a few naive internet blurters, under radar racists or just thickies jockeying for one term backbencher status is hardly making or breaking any campaign. Where are the new observations on policy? The comparison charts of various platform implications? Would it kill you to make a table? No, bloggers are what they are: at best, fact cross-checking hobbists with little grasp on which facts are the important ones to cross-check and, at worst, partisans with degrees of association and hackery to their cause while presenting the party line as independent thinking, perhaps in return for bits like a access to a shadow cabinet member or some other crumb to the needy.
When you think about it, the more interesting observation is how little actually independent citizen journalist blogging there is left in this election. First, quite a few have simply packed it in since the last election and venerable institutions like the ecumenical BlogsCanada E-Group failed to take off this time. Other bloggers have handed the keys to anyone who asks for it, diluting both voice and quality while enhancing only the echo chamber. Further, few of the replacements (but not always) are up to it meaning we are forced that bit more (as always) to ignore any blog too often using the key words "feh", "tinfoil", "liebranos", "Hitler" or any other sure signs of "me too" thought copyists or fronts for those still in junior-high. Plus, far more ominous...except that it's just blogs we are talking about...all that space for bloggers provided (with easy semi-pro pay for people like me!) in 2006 has been sopped up by in-house journalists who post the word "blog" at the top of columns to give the impression that they and their bosses get it(!). To be fair, a few like Stephen Taylor may not need the CTV leverage now. He and a few others are something different again. That is interesting but is it still blogging? It really isn't citizen journalism.
Most telling or perhaps simply as good an illustration as there is...again, keeping in mind we speak only of blogs...rather than paying the likes of me again (and, honestly, none of it was worth anything much though I sure liked the pay if not the editorial committee) CBC has ditched the 2005-06 Election Roundtable idea for the far weirder and harder and harder to find Ormiston Online which uses the intermediary of a web analysis group called The Infoscape Lab to winnow the entire blogosphere into periodic top five post lists which, synth-tastically, often have more than one post from a given blog. Voila! The great big net is reduced to a tiny sieve even while a principle is confirmed: it's not crummy reporting as long as they are just explaining what the lab results said.
Fabulous. Just what citizen journalism promised.
Other news for Day 23:
- The headlines, like the one to the right, setting out the scale of these promises are getting harder and harder to believe.
- Can you ask for a strong mandate without publishing a platform? Mandate for what?
Comments
Michael Nesbitt - September 29, 2008 10:24 am
It's like walking into a busy coffee shop: all kinds of opinions being poured out, and disappearing from useful impact as quickly as the money that percolated them.
Alan - September 29, 2008 10:27 am
Yet with archives...
Ben (The Tiger) - September 29, 2008 11:08 am
Re the platform (or lack thereof) --
Hey, if you're going to break promises, why make them in the first place. :p
Alan - September 29, 2008 11:19 am
Indeed! I once lived in a land where it became apparent that no one broke their word often because, when you reviewed what had happened, you found they actually never gave it.
Ben (The Tiger) - September 29, 2008 11:22 am
Probably also means the prospects for Tory governance that even you would (continue to) like are decent.
The man wants to be around not for a good time, but a long time. (To do a 180' from the Trooper lyrics.)
Alan - September 29, 2008 11:26 am
That last bit I do not see. I think he is not wanting to be PM for a decade or more. But he is burdened by a lack of a successor. Who was the bitter over-extended czar who started as a reformer and and ended as a tyrant? Nicholas II?
Ben (The Tiger) - September 29, 2008 11:31 am
Nah, Nicky was a weakling who ended up being shot.
That description would work for either Alexander I or Alexander II. (Alexander III, by contrast, was a tyrant the whole way through. And really, Alexander II just got bad press -- he was pretty liberal right up till when he was assassinated in 1881, the day after he adopted a proposed constitution for Russia.)
***
But yes, this is the problem with the Bernier flameout -- he was the PM's preferred successor.
Ben (The Tiger) - September 29, 2008 11:34 am
That said, this has been Harper's whole career -- he really would have preferred to be the power behind the throne, it's just that there really <i><b>was</b></i> nobody left on the political right in 2001 who wasn't incompetent to lead.
(Or is that just what he wants me to believe?)
Hans - September 29, 2008 1:09 pm
Don't tell me the name of the land Al... Let me guess... Its initals are P, E & I?
Alan - September 29, 2008 1:31 pm
I can't comment, Hans, given the observation of fact has been officially labeled as hate mongering pursuant to regulation.
Ben, similarly, I cannot advise on what you have been led to believe. You have to release yourself from such self-awareness.
Renee - September 29, 2008 1:31 pm
Don't you understand how it works? Harper gives a throne speech, with a bunch of keywords and vague ideals, and if that passes the vote he claims that that is the platform and that the mandate was given by Parliament for him to implement whatever his interpretation of the fuzzy wording of the throne speech is. And if you don't like it, you're MAKING PARLIAMENT DYSFUNCTIONAL.
Btw, have a handbook about how to sabotage commons committees. Free when you buy a Conservative Party t-shirt.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled "meh."
Alan - September 29, 2008 1:34 pm
What is the relative value of a "meh" when calculated in units of "feh"?
Alan - September 29, 2008 1:35 pm
And, to be honest, I am shocked that none of you have commented on my fantastic photoshopping skills:
http://www.genx40.com/file/trillions.JPG
Renee - September 29, 2008 1:41 pm
1 Feh = 10 Meh (1 Feh = 1 CentiMeh)
1 Blargh = 10 Feh
1 Snork = 10 Blargh
PS: FANTASTIC photoshopping.
Renee - September 29, 2008 1:42 pm
Damn, I messed up my units. Stupid metric system:
1 Feh = 10 Meh (1 Feh = 1 CentiMeh)
1 Blargh = 100 Feh
1 Snork = 100 Blargh = 1 KiloFeh
aRTie - September 29, 2008 1:57 pm
What's 1 in 51.8 billion? The chances of Jack Layton ever getting to live at 24 Sussex.
Seriously, I'd guess the only time a number greater than 1 billion is real for the NDP is when they look at all the Canadians since the party's inception who have realized that a vote for the NDP is a wasted vote. Although, given Layton's rhetoric of late, it doesn't seem they've understood that figure either.
In other news, the mainstream media (in the form of a blog) have brought up one interesting story that is as good as the Rhino party ever got when it was still around:
http://blog.macleans.ca/2008/09/26/bloc-blocked-bluster-begins/
Apparently some dude took a Bloc url and forwarded it to Sebastien Caron's www.blockthebloc.ca. Bloc response? Raise enough of a fuss that their opponents get free Macleans coverage.
Real smart Gilles.
Alan - September 29, 2008 2:03 pm
No vote is a wasted vote. By that logic, all votes for parties who did not form government are wasted. Which implicitly means you hate democracy. Which is a proposition I could never accept so you must be incorrect.
Renee - September 29, 2008 11:57 pm
C'mon, Alan, admit it: democracy is for losers. Mussolini had the right idea. The trains, they ran on time! Also, the book burnings were spectacular. And I'll bet they never would have tolerated a dysfunctional parliament either.
Alan - September 30, 2008 11:04 am
Readers of the CBC's website have also noticed the lack of breadth in the chosen methodology.