Is OffTheBus A Rigged Deal?
by Patrick Ruffini :: June 20th, 2007 6:35 pmJay Rosen and Arianna Huffington have announced their new hires for their OffTheBus project: Amanda Michel and Zack Exley.
There’s a brief conversation in PressThink’s comments about “… how it looks to hire two liberal Democratic political operatives to run a journalism project?”
…
I’m skeptical that the partnering between PressThink and Huffington Post has anything to do with limiting their hires to two liberal political operatives. I think Jay conflates organizations with individuals. Jay makes no mention of reaching out to Patrick Ruffini, David All or Mike Turk.
Two things here. Yes, this was in my vanity search feed. And no, I don’t want the job (though I suppose it’s always nice to be asked).
This is the blogosphere, so there is no warranty of objectivity or balance. The Huffington Post can hire anyone they want, as far as I’m concerned. But by bringing in Rosen, one of the nation’s preeminent media critics, they clearly wanted this to look like a respectable journalistic enterprise, and not a partisan left-wing one. That raises the bar for them a bit.
It’s eerily similar to other recent nonpartisan efforts in the world of online politics that purport to be bipartisan, but by design or in practice work out to be less than that. Take the questions about Facebook’s playing favorites with Obama. Or Lawrence Lessig’s letter to the RNC about freeing the debates, which was heavily stacked with left-leaning signatories until Mike Turk and David All worked to round up more Republicans. (I’ll cop to not being ready to sign when first approached, but eventually doing so.)
Are conservatives just perennially late to the party here? Or are the social circles in which the Rosens and Huffingtons run dictating personnel decisions about cool projects and thus perceptions of who is up and down online?
UPDATE: Rosen responds. Well of course, I wouldn’t want this to be kumbaya bipartisanship. Isn’t that what HotSoup tried to do, and it failed? But the fact of its sponsorship makes it very clear who will be using the platform. Daily Kos is an open platform, but I don’t see many conservatives using it.
If I were more reactive than I am, I’d suggest it would make perfect sense for Townhall or National Review to launch a competitor asap, because the practical fact of the matter is that’s the only way you’ll get conservatives to use it.
Tagged: citizen journalism 
jay rosen offthebus
Comments (3) 
Trackbacks (0) 
del.icio.us 
digg it 
subscribe
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Insularity is, pardon the expression, a two-way street. Lefties aren’t the only ones who like to hang with their own kind. Isn’t it about shared interests after all? We really do need to break down these barriers and say we all have a shared interest in running this country in a socially and fiscally responsible way for all people, not just the people we think deserve it. If a bipartisan approach didn’t work once, it doesn’t mean it can’t work again. Our government structure should be bipartisan and has been often in history. It can be again–as can the communities on line and in the flesh that support it.
Does it really matter who she hires? Her job as of late seems to have been to bash the democratic leadership 24/7, so she don’t even have to show support for any republican, her hit pieces against the likes of Gore and Kerry did the deed.
The Left intermingling with itself has been the norm for years. I went to the first BloggerCon in 2003. Back then the political blogosphere was dominated by conservatives. Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan, the Bush fan, were top dogs. But the place was filled with Leftists who thought Howard Dean, M.D. was the bomb. Their insularity has continued through today.