How Democratic Party Blogs Filter Information

Here’s a blog that readers of Dailykos despised:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/28/970914/-Obama-Denies-Vermont-He…

Here’s one a day later (currently on their most-popular list) that they loved:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/28/971283/-Alan-Simpson-Just-Asked…

FireDogLake loved both. Democratic Underground got into a bitter split over the first one and loved the second one.

The first one criticizes Obama and the second one criticizes Alan Simpson, a Republican.

Now, that’s not all that they do. And the first one is not beyond the range of possible criticism quite apart from targeting Obama.

But the first one describes something that Obama did. He signed into law a health insurance reform bill that made it much more difficult for states to enact single-payer healthcare. An amendment to fix that had been passed in committee overruling the committee chairman. Speaker Pelosi had gone on TV and said she’d had to strip the amendment out of the final bill because of Obama’s promise that everyone could keep their existing insurance if they wanted to. I also claimed to know that the committee chair and Pelosi had been instructed in this detail (as in every other on this bill) by Obama. Few at DailyKos wanted to take my word for it. They were also quite obsessed with the fact that Obama has more recently said he would support legislation to allow Vermont waivers needed to create a single-payer healthcare system. That such a bill would be hard to pass, and that Obama is responsible for Vermont NEEDING the waivers in the first place (or at least needing them much more badly than before) seems to be of no interest. Words speak louder than actions. Unless they are my words and they are criticizign a Democrat.

In the second blog, I wrote about an event, and I included videos of some of it. But the key points that I highlighted in my text I did not include video for. DailyKosers had just my word to go by, yet they were happy to do so. After all, Simpson is a Republican.

I don’t mean to pick on Kos in particular, but to use it as an example of a popular Democratic-loyalist site. Facts get filtered. Some are more welcome than others.

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