Sean-Paul at The Agonist has a petition letter to the National Press Club, taking issue with their planned featuring of Gannon Guckert as part of an overall lightweight and conservatively-biased panel on "Blogging or Journalism?"

It's bad enough to applaud a man whose claim to fame is having gotten into the White House press room using a fake name to toss the president softball questions, a man whose online presence has been more in the lines of pornography and prostitution than either journalism or blogging, but to put him on this panel, whose sole liberal voice is a comic blogger, also seems to reflect a conservative bias.

Don't get me wrong, I think Ana Marie Cox is great. Hers was one of the first blogs I read regularly. But having her as the sole liberal voice on a three-person panel that ostensibly is to take on such a serious question as blogging and journaism is kind of like having Jon Stewart as the liberal analyst on a panel exploring cable news. It promises to be funny, and I'm sure there could be some zingers, but this is the National Press Club, not a Friar's roast. Wouldn't one of the more notable serious bloggers have merited an invitation?

And so when Sean-Paul put this petition together, I thought it worthwhile to sign it, mainly because as a serious organization the NPC might better take blogging a little more seriously. If this panel ends up on C-SPAN, you can bet that it will get a lot more attention than otherwise. This petition letter is really an attempt to get the National Press Club to actually pay attention to the questions it's raising with this panel, and how their current choices threaten to make a mockery of the whole thing.

I'm not a member of the National Press Club. I'm not a journalist. I'm not much of a blogger. But I do see that the MSM -- this time as represented by a professional journalists' association -- are again just not getting "the bloggers" and are perpetuating stereotypes.

If you want to join this petition, go here and write Sean-Paul at
seanpaul-at-agonist.org.

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media girl also blogs at other places.