Archive: Media
Negativity Rules
Here it comes. Tim Kaine launched a biting ad yesterday. It shows a birthday cake with the picture of a red schoolhouse in frosting. It's called "Slice." You can see it here. As a hand uses a knife to start slicing up the cake, an announcer says: "Jerry Kilgore wants to end the state lottery, slicing out $400 million from local schools. Kilgore promised to repeal last year's budget agreement, taking another billion dollars from our kids' education." It concludes by saying: "Any way you slice it, Kilgore will cut education." Of course, it takes some liberties: Kilgore's opposition to the lottery was back in 1997, before the lottery was dedicated by constitution to go to schools. He now supports it. And while he opposed the tax increases last year, he now says he wouldn't fight that battle again. Jerry Kilgore responded with his own ad today. You can see it...
By Michael Shear | September 17, 2005; 09:11 AM ET | Comments (21)
Bloggers are People Too
Virginia's political bloggers gathered this weekend -- in person, not in cyberspace -- for a bit of self-reflection, so-so hotel food, and some discussion about the future of political discourse in the Old Dominion. Jim Bacon was there. So were Waldo Jaquith and Chad Dotson, who conceived the event. Will Vehrs attended. Kenton Ngo came (he's 14, so his parents drove him to Charlottesville) Norman Leahy was there for a bit. And of course, Lowell Feld, too. There were dozens of other bloggers, too, and a handful of politicians and some members of the non-blogging press. (Disclosure: I was there, too, as part of both worlds.) On the brink of Virginia's first bloggable election, it's not a bad idea to think about what impact, if any, this new form of media might have. At the end of a seven-hour conference, one thing is clear: no one knows. There was certainly a...
By Michael Shear | August 28, 2005; 10:04 PM ET | Comments (7)
A Blogging Lovefest
Okay, bloggers can be brutal. Sitting in front of their computer screens, it's easy to hammer out tirades against one candidate or the other. Conservative bloggers launch screeds against Tim Kaine. Liberal ones bash Jerry Kilgore. But get the bloggers away from their electronic notepad, it seems, and they get a bit less aggressive. In what his campaign billed as perhaps the first-ever conference call just for bloggers in the nation, Kaine invited seven bloggers (including yours truly) to a Q-and-A session this morning. The participants included: Norman Leahy, One Man's TrashWaldo Jaquith, Waldo.Jaquith.OrgWill Vehrs, Bacon's RebellionChad Dotson, Commonwealth ConservativeKenton Ngo, 750 VoltsLowell Feld, Raising Kaine You might have expected, with that bunch of raconteurs, a lively, even combative exchange with Kaine, who, after all, is regularly skewered on some of those blogs and practically canonized on others. (Of course, the most vitriol is often reserved for other bloggers, or the...
By Michael Shear | July 27, 2005; 11:22 AM ET | Comments (29)
