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Posts published in “Day: May 20, 2006”

Manufacturing outrage

May 20, 2006

Credit University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer with pulling the plug on the latest cycle of insanity-cum-outrage, a cycle spinning fast courtesy of a small group of UO students on one side, and none other than Bill O'Reilly on the other.

Student Insurgent flagStarts with a group of students who for some years have been publishing something called the Student Insurgent, which proclaims, "We are unaffiliated with any partisan organization. We seek to provide a forum for those working towards a society free from oppression based on class, gender, sexual orientation, race, species,and free from the threat of ecological collapse." Sounds predictably far-left-wingy, and it is; it seems to be trying to make a point of being farther out there than anyone else. It is funded in part by student fees and has used campus mailing to get a discounted rate, though it is not a student newspaper (that would be the Daily Emerald).

The editors of the Insurgentdecided in their March edition to provoke some thought (thought? or just yelps?) about the recent battle over cartoons in Europe on the subject of Mohammed and Islam; the cartoons published in Eugene would be cartoons of Jesus. Some of them were graphically sexual in nature, were designed to provoke, and to that extent succeeded. Uproar quickly ensued. (more…)

MSM blogging

May 20, 2006

To read opinion pieces about blogging in newspapers (and see them on the tube), and to read about the MSM (mainstream media, to you dead-tree folks) in many blogs, you'd think a kind of trench warfare between two opposing sides is underway. It isn't true; the lines have long since been breached.

Blogs have from the beginning relied heavily on other media for news and other items (and we reference them regularly). For their part, newspapers have increasingly been using blog-developed information too. And the key bridge between the sides may actually be the growing number of blogs by newspaper writers, under the aegis of those newspapers.

Our immediate hook for this discussion is the launching (okay, it was last month, but we just spotted it) of a blog in the Olympian newspaper by reporter Adam Wilson. But let's take a look at the newspaper politics/public affairs blog scene around the Northwest; there's more here than you might think. (more…)