| Saturday, November 21, 2009 |
The 34th annual March for Life today in Washington, D.C., aims to enlist lawmakers, judges and new supporters to the anti-abortion cause. But energized activists also will parade through an associated Blogs4Life conference before and after the march.
In its second year, this one-day gathering of bloggers is drawing heavyweight speakers such as Republican presidential hopefuls Sen. Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and Rep. Duncan Hunter, of California.
True, political site Daily Kos attracted Democratic White House aspirants to its 2006 Yearly Kos convention of progressive bloggers in Las Vegas.
As Blogs4Life organizers put it, "This is an excellent opportunity for individuals and organizations to network with pro-life bloggers and develop an understanding about how weblog technology can be strategically used to promote life and turn ideas into action. It is also a unique occasion for bloggers to meet face to face and brainstorm about how to work together more effectively."
In other words, the blog conference likely will continue paying publicity and organizational dividends for the movement long after media coverage of today's march fades away.
Pro-Life Pulse proprietor Jill Stanek, another scheduled Blogs4Life speaker, also sees the gathering – which is open to curious non-bloggers – as a good way to grow her corner of the blogosphere.
"I think expanding blogging in the pro-life world is important for the same reasons blogging has become invaluable in the world in general," Stanek said last week via e-mail.
Those reasons include correcting "mainstream media mistakes and misinformation" and "mak[ing] public what it won't" – not to mention pushing the movement's political agenda and taking opponents to task.
For more information on the conference, sponsored by the conservative Family Research Council, visit blogs4life.com. It's recommended reading for activists of all political stripes.
Drilling downLike everyone else writing online, conservative bloggers also fall flat on their pixels sometimes. Such was the case with the warblogging community this month.
As part of their campaign against alleged media misinformation about the Iraq war, warblogs such as Flopping Aces hit the warpath over an Associated Press source they were certain had been invented by reporters bent on exaggerating the horrors of Baghdad.
The AP had used Iraqi police Capt. Jamil Hussein as a source for dozens of stories without incident. But when the news service quoted Hussein detailing a November incident in which Shiite attackers purportedly burned to death six Sunnis at a mosque, warbloggers blew a fuse.
Many of them view the government as a more credible information source than the mainstream media. So when U.S. military and Iraqi Interior Ministry officials denied Hussein existed, warbloggers considered that proof the AP was up to no good. The frenzy intensified when the news service refused to produce the officer on demand.
Of course, logic and past experience suggest the government sources were more likely than the AP to be wrong. After all, both governments had strong motives to downplay sectarian violence, while the news service would risk losing the credibility that sustains it by inventing a source.
But the warbloggers persisted in their quest to expose the AP's supposed fraud for six heady weeks – until Jan. 4, when the "Interior Ministry acknowledged … that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media," as the news service ably reported.
MSM types still do a few things right. One lesson bloggers should learn from them: Treat government assertions with skepticism.
For links to mentioned sites, visit www.spokesmanreview.com/blogs/spot. Contact Frank Sennett at (509) 744-5700 or altsourceradio@yahoo.com.