One word: Equity.
I have in the past posted personal observations about issues that everybody else was talking about, and they have gotten unceremoniously whisked away from News/Activism to Bloggers & Personal or General/Chat within minutes.
Primary example: My original analysis over the controversy over President Bush saying to Matt Lauer in a pre-election 2004 interview "I don't think you can win it," "It" being the war on terror. Kerry and Edwards and every media outlet save Fox News and, surprisingly, NBC News, deliberately misinterpreted it, leading up to Edwards' hilarious declaration to bin Laden that he and Kerry would track him down and kill him. It could not have possibly been more than ten minutes before that thread was shifted from News/Activism to Bloggers & Personal. The link in the N/A sidebar disappeared, and it died after six replies and less than a hundred views.
Meanwhile, vanity threads that seem to have been written with clenched fists banging the keyboard by people bitching about Shepard Smith are posted in News/Activism and stay there. Last week, a thread titled " I LIKE CHEESE!!! (I have no sister or moose) (vanity)" stayed in News/Activism.
You tell me, gridlock; What indication of a consistent policy exists here?
Wouldn't you surmise that a vanity thread from a blog sourcing itself and posting under a screen name that is the URL of the blog firmly places it in the "Bloggers & Personal" section? To me, it qualifies as spam; it certainly is NOT a "news" story. BlogsforThompson.com is doing the same thing the Washington Post did regarding George Allen's unfortunate "macaca" gaffe and all the MSM did regarding Swift Boat Veterans for Truth's anti-Kerry ads: they declared that intractable damage to their ideological opponents' public image had been done, and cited as proof their own drumbeat of biased coverage of the alleged damage.
IOW, the Fred people, aware that there is no direct connection to the Romney campaign anymore than there was a direct connection of the anti-Hillary "1984" Macintosh spoof an Obama contractor posted on YouTube, want to pound into your brain that Romney's denials are falling on deaf ears among the populace when there is little evidence anyone even gives a rat's.
The speciousness of the blogsforthompson.com angle is secondary to my complaint. The larger point is that it seems more and more lately like the moderators are acting like Judge Roy Bean. As much as I can't stand Ron Paul, it was outrageous that a moderator inserted a series of images lampooning Paul underneath a Paul press release posted by a Paul supporter.
Do the mods even have rules to abide by? And why don't any of them have the balls to reply?
The first reply you get with a comment like that is going to be a fireball from above. I've been there, trust me.
At the end of the day, the rules are whatever JimRob wants them to be. He seems to be having a fair amount of success with this thing, following his own internal rules.
If I were Admin Moderator for a day, I would get rid of all of the sidebar classifications. I would like it better if everything was dumped into the general forum. If a stupid vanity is not worthy of interest, it will die a quick death as people ignore it. If there is something that is interesting, people will discuss it, even if it is a Vanity or a blog post.
It is interesting to me that FR, which has been in the vanguard of personal journalism and predates the blogger revolution, has such a low opinion of blogs. A lot of good news is broken in blogs these days, and it is shuffled off into the Blogger/Personal Memory Hole, and FR must ignore it until it is picked up by a "legitimate" news source. I like it better when things are wide open, and we are allowed to sort the wheat from the chaff ourselves.
Hey, AM's how about a personal setting where we can set our own screen to ignore the sidebar classifications? I would click that button!