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.
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Tagged: citizen journalism 
jay rosen offthebus
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