The Importance of Just Showing-Up: A Short Rant on Politics, Blogging, and Journalism

Its an old maxim that politics is pretty much run by those who bother to show up.

Anyone who thinks there is no truth to that, needs to visit Walk In Brain, the blogger from Cincinnati who recently showed-up in North Adams, MA.

Walk In Brain is being welcomed by MA political bloggers, as is our custom when we discover new a progressive political blog. Well, if in less than a year anything can be called a custom. Anyway, its something we do in MA as the political blogosphere steadily becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Wes Flinn, the man behind the blog, moved to North Adams to take a job as Assistant Professor of Music at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Turns out that he was in town less than three weeks and he had already attended a city council meeting; been asked to run for council (he declined. Way too soon to even think about it); met Ted Kennedy, and was profiled by the North Adams Transcript!

"What's happened is that those of us who are interested in politics have started to discover what the real possibilities are of blogging on a political level," [he told the Transcript.] "It's not just about raising funds for candidates, it's almost an open-source think tank. There's the free flow of ideas, the interchange and, hopefully, lively and robust discussion."

"While the mainstream media has a tendency to present political bloggers as wild cards spouting biased lunacy, Flinn believes they might be missing the big picture by focusing so intently on specific bloggers."

"'Democracy is not always clean and discussion is not always clean,'" said Flinn. "'I think it's important that these discussions take place and people get passionate about it. I would be distrustful of people who weren't passionate about something.'"

From what I have seen so far, Wes epitomizes the kind of passionate civic engagement that the political blogosphere has been all about. Meanwhile, from what I've heard, the main concern the mainstream media has about bloggers is not biased luncacy, so much as that people are tuning them out -- and tuning us in.

(Biased lunacy? Fox News anyone?)

I love newspapers, and I want them not just to survive but to become robust engines of a revival of the spirit of constitutional democracy in America -- instead of trending toward being tepid toadies to power, filled with celebrity profiles and entertainment news. I hope that newspapers will seize the opportunity to play a vital role in informing and revitalizing democracy -- fearlessly and fairly holding government, and candidates, and corporations accountable.

I would hate to see the further demise of newspaper journalism because people decide that if they want entertainment news they can do better on TV, and for information about politics and government, they can turn to the internet.

Time was, TV and cable were the main competition for newspapers. As much as I think that blogs and the internet are helping to bring a renewed vitality to American democracy, I don't want to see newspapers lose the competition. A vigorous independent press in America -- operating based on the highest standards of journalism -- is something we need to value, and to demand. It is just too important

Whatever newspapers finally decide to do, I am celebrating the continuing dawn of the political blogosphere. Citizens of all sorts are writing and publishing like never before. The authors of the First Amendment would be amazed and thrilled.