Yikes! Columbia's military claims they just destroyed two Venezuelan planes that were transporting arms to anti-government guerillas in Columbia. (I saw this only on an AP item on AOL.) The US has had its fingers in the Columbian situation for a long time. And the Bush Administration has been unfriendly, to say the least, to the regime of President Hugo Chávez in oil-rich Venezuela. Columbia and the US claim that Venezuela isn't going enough to help fight the guerrillas along the border.
I don't know a lot of details about this. But I hope Bush & Co aren't intending to get involved in more "regime change" in Venezuela. We've got more than enough of that on our hands in Afghanistan and Iraq!
On another subject, I've come across a Mississippi/Tennessee-based political blog that has some good commentary and lots of useful links relative to the issues I've touched on in the current Governor's race there. It's called Signifying Nothing (a famous phrase for Faulkner fans).
Nick Confessore is thinking about The Meaning of Blogs. He says, "The fun of reading blogs is to watch smart, well-informed people chew over, interpret and re-interpret they've read in the paper or elsewhere. But if you got rid of the 'old' print media, what would bloggers blog about?"
I think he's on the mark there. Some blogs, like Josh Marshall's Talking Points or Calpundit, do publish original interviews or journalistic reporting. But mostly, the news-oriented blogs channel, comment on, and spread the word about the work of the professional journalists.
They are filling a portion of the gaping hole left by the market failures of corporate-dominated media by rescuing some stories (famously, Trent Lott's birthday tribute to the now-departed Strom Thurmond) from the oblivion of the back pages. And in the digital age, the flood of information we get requires both more critical thinking and new filtering devices. Blogs do both, by making a wealth of freewheeling commentary available immediately, and by helping people focus in on news stories that are important to them.
They're also a good hobby.
3 comments:
If they shut down the news, we call all discuss our love life. LOL
That Happy Chica,
Marcia Ellen
i think blogs are the new journalism of our time. when it is possible to immediately link to news as it is happening, for example, by reading a blogger in iraq, this is beyond anything print journalism can accomplish. at the moment i'm amazed how the Big Bloggers seem able to pick news out of the air BEFORE it appears in print, and flash it across the net. i doubt we'll need to resort to discussing our love life or medical problems. this phenomenon is only going to snowball.
Of course, the way political journalism has been going, we can discuss all our politicians' love lives before long. It may get to the point that if a politician *doesn't* have a sex scandal or a substance abuse history that it will count against them. :) Instead of VH1's "Behind the Music" about rock stars' faults, we can have "Behind the Politics." - Bruce
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