Posted on 09/09/2012 8:27:55 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
....Whatever lessons the Democrats take from Charlotte, whatever it did for the president or for the ambitious senators and governors who stalked delegate breakfasts and whispered “2016,” this is a fact: The convention was successfully trolled.
I don’t use troll in the pejorative sense. Actually, I may be trying to craft a neutral meaning of troll where none previously existed. The term, in its modern Internet usage, refers to people who want to start fights online to bring the universe into an argument on their terms. It comes not from Grimm literature, but from a fishing technique in which multiple lines are baited and dragged to haul in the maximum amount of cold-bloods.
Democrats did not expect to spend Wednesday arguing about the capital of Israel and the appearance of the word “God” in their platform. There were, reportedly, 15,000 members of the media in Charlotte, of whom maybe 14,980 could have given a damn about the party platform. On Tuesday night, when the Obama campaign and the DNC released its platform, none of the bigfoot media outlets in town spent time on the text.
No, it took until Wednesday morning for Jeff Dunetz, at the YidWithALid blog, to comment that “Democrats have removed this pro-Israel section from their platform.”.....At 11:26 a.m., Weekly Standard reporter Daniel Halper published a story on the platform, making the same point. (He credited YidWithALid.)
It could have ended there. But within a few hours, CNN and Fox News were browbeating Democrats to ask why they’d changed the platform—why, too, had they removed an old reference to “God-given talents,” and thus deleted YHWH from the text? Democrats gave up........
................who thought, just 11 months after the launch of the Occupy movement, that 99 percenters would have less influence on the platform than conservative media?...............
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
“Regarding ‘trolling,’ ” Weekly Standard reporter John McCormack told me via email, “I think the word ‘reporting’ would be better.”* I agree. The Washington Times, the Examiner, and other conservative media were trying to get Democrats on the record on subjects they’d rather ignore and finesse. “The mainstream press had a good amount of coverage on GOP platform's abortion plank,” wrote McCormack, “(which was silent on exceptions and hadn't changed at all from past) so they could talk about abortion in the instance of rape.” The rest of the media skipped out on covering the Democrats’ platform negotiations, and missed out on the story of the Jerusalem planks.
For all the talk about "trolling" (shouldn't that be "trawling" if it comes from the fishing world?) this was a triumph for reporting things that the mainstream media doesn't want to report.
FWIW, apparently "trolling" and "trawling" are both ways of fishing. I can't help thinking, though, that if it weren't for the under-the-bridge-living trolls the term wouldn't have caught on.
The two things about both of the conventions that will stick in the voters minds more than anything else will be the Empty Chair and the Removal of God.
I see many open forums on the internet..
Let them rage.
I agree.
Most of the media are not in the convention hall. They are in portable buildings or perhaps another large permanent building. They write their pieces as if they were in the convention hall In 2000 I saw this myself. Most media is just reporting what C-span or the networks... The few permitted inside... Choose to air. It is almost a hoax.
The left’s definition of a troll: anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
Look forward to “anti-troll” laws in the future.
Interesting perspective!
If the mass media were fair and balanced, Romney would not be a nominee.
Yeah, it's just not fair that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NPT, The NY Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post are getting ganged up on by Fox. :=)
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