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Pollard column: Blogs open doors of politics to everyone
| Wednesday, May 23 2007 10:35 PM
Last Updated: Wednesday, May 23 2007 11:15 PM
SACRAMENTO -- If you haven't found The Californian's new political blog yet, please check it out.
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It's called "Politics, Anyone?"
It's in the list of staff blogs you can find via a link on the paper's main Web page or go to it directly at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/politicsanyone.
We hope you'll check it out often and feel free to chip in with comments.
As we say in the introduction in the blog's "profile" link, we understand that politics has a bad smell to many people.
That's truly unfortunate. Politics is the way the government makes decisions for you on everything from going to war to fixing the pothole in your street.
But fortunately, millions of people who probably would never relate to politics and politicians in the traditional way have found ways to connect to it through the Internet.
Through blogs, streaming audio and video, e-mail networks and even YouTube and MySpace, people are discussing and understanding politics and politicians on their own terms for the first time. And they're finding it a lot more interesting and engaging than many of them thought it would be.
"Politics is fueled by gossip and late-breaking information, and blogs make that a lot more accessible," said Steven Maviglio, communications director for Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, D-Los Angeles. "In some cases, it's somebody sitting at the end of their bed in pajamas on a keyboard and in other cases it's journalists doing it in more traditional ways, but they are all contributing to the process."
And in turn, those New Media and the people who use them are having a profound effect on politics and politicians.
"It's a complete revolution," said Dan Brennan, communications chief for state Sen. Roy Ashburn, R-Bakersfield. "It's all being completely redone. The traditional media is probably on its way out. While that's going on, you basically have everybody contributing to the whole process so everybody becomes an amateur publisher."
State Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, said -- in an e-mail answer to a question for this column -- "I think there is a real value to the abundant access to information made possible through blogs and sites like YouTube. I see these as informal conversations" with constituents.
One of the reasons political communicators like Brennan and Maviglio love the Internet is the sheer volume of information it can handle.
"In the old days, it was the reporter and the legislator or his staff having a conversation, and that got printed," Brennan said. "Now it still gets printed, but underneath that is the discussion that's continuing on the blogs ... I think it's good for democracy and it's kind of liberating to have all that information going back and forth.
Andrew Lamar, a former newspaper reporter who's now a spokesman for the state Senate's leader, Don Perata of Oakland, said, "In most cases, blogs pick up stuff that newspapers wouldn't necessarily report because it's kind of minor, or gossipy, or not something you would hang a standard news story on."
But they say the downside of that is the speed of the Internet and the different viewpoints -- and sometimes the contrariness -- of some bloggers.
"What can be hard for us," Lamar said, "is see some things on blogs that we think are way off base, and then others look at them and key their reporting off of that."
Maviglio, however, said the Internet makes it easier to correct misinformation than it was when they had to wait for the next news cycle of a newspaper or television station.
"If there's an error or an update that's needed," he said, "I can take care of that more quickly now."
Vic Pollard's column appears every other Thursday. E-mail him at vpollard@bakersfield.com.