Legal Commentary

The State of Blogger Discourse on Obama and Hillary

By Jeralyn

Huffington Post writer and political commentator Cliff Schecter and I did a segment today on MSNBC on the heated nature of the discourse in the blogosphere between bloggers supporting Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Skippy has an excellent summary and take on it.

Both Cliff and I opined the blogosphere will come together to support whichever Democrat is nominated. It was a very friendly segment. I'm sure the producers were disappointed. They were hoping for fireworks between an "Obama blogger" and a "Hillary blogger" and they got a unified front.

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I pointed out it's the commenters more than the bloggers who tend to get overheated when discussing Obama and Hillary. Cliff agreed.

I was asked if I thought the hostilities would be a problem for the Democratic party in November. I said I hope not and I believe we will come together because beating McCain is more important.

I said commenters don't necessarily represent the views of the bloggers whose sites they comment on and it's up to bloggers to reign in their commenters while noting that some might have a problem with that.

The theme of the segment was that it's a primary, things get heated, but Democrats will come together once the nominee is chosen and support the candidate. The important thing is to get a Democrat back in the White House. I believe we will do that.

As an aside, TalkLeft does restrict commenters. It does not allow insults, name-calling or personal attacks. Commenters must stay on topic and they can't try to dominate or hijack the threads. It's how we choose to run this blog. It is not a statement on how other bloggers should run their blogs.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 17, 2008 (boomark / email).