I am a blogger. This is my blog. No one asked me to do this. It was my decision. The world wasn’t clamoring for my opinion… and I’m not sure how valuable it is on any given topic.
The difference between bloggers and everyone else is we’re willing to waste the time to do this. We think people might want to hear what we say. Mostly, they don’t.
We’re opinionated, we’re bores, we’re self important.
With this in mind, I am disappointed to have just seen a segment on CNN where two political bloggers were asked to speak their mind, as if they had some sort of expert qualification to make their opinion important.
Both bloggers were conservative, but that is not my point. The question being pondered, about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, called out for a conservative’s response. Conservative, liberal, middle-of-the-road, it makes no difference.
Are bloggers worthy of being called upon as experts or spokepersons just because they blog?
I quickly jotted down the names of the bloggers and their blogs. Lorie Byrd writes on PoliPundit.com. Alexa.com says today PoliPundit.com is the 48,576th most popular site on the web!
Erick-Woods Erickson’s RedState.org is today’s 15,401st most popular website. Alexa also finds 35 sites that link back to RedState.org (PoliPundit.com does). CNN on the other hand has over 19,000 sites linked back to it!
It should be noted, both of these sites are way more popular than mine.
Lorie Byrd and Erick-Woods Erickson are probably very nice, thoughtful people. Maybe they have sage wisdom we should all listen to. But isn’t it a bit ironic that these two self selected voices are being called upon to express the conservative concern that, not enough is known about Harriet Miers.
What about them? Without CNN, I wouldn’t have even known they exist. I now know their opinions, but without context. Why are their opinions important enough to receive this lightly filtered national exposure?
I don’t know.