Nobody really blogs anymore anyway

From Jan Moller's legislative session rundown:

• Political blogging is the wave of the future, political bloggers say.

The link is to a Monroe News-Star profile on Louisiana political blogs which reads like another one of those "Gee whiz the kids and their internets" stories we thought we'd seen the bulk of five or six years ago. My favorite line:

While the blogs may differ slightly in the way they frame issues, almost all of the state's prominent blogs lean to the right of the political spectrum.

I did not know that.

Also, while Moller's remark seems a bit skeptical... although Moller seems to read The Old River Road way more often than I ever have.... I sort of agree with the sentiment. As more internet users spend their link-sharing time on Facebook, as net neutrality reform threatens to make some sites less accessible, and as the amount of news content made available for people to share for free continues to shrink, I'd say that political blogging (at least of the "democratization of information" sort described in this article) is more the wave of the past.

Credit where it's due

I tend to be critical of Jan Moller's tendency to uncritically regurgitate the PBJ party line in his reporting. But I have found his daily rundowns of the Legislative agenda this session to be very helpful.

Today's Mollerism

What begins as a preview of today's business in the State Legislative session gradually devolves into a series of links designed to demonstrate how much everyone still loves Governor PBJ. My favorite bit is the part where Moller links to this post at Old River Road which reads, in part.

If you caught the Governor's opening address to the legislature earlier today you saw flashes of the Bobby Jindal we've been talking about, and the one we reference on our bumper sticker -- the Bobby who is less concerned with the political ramifications of a decision and more concerned with fixing Louisiana. You saw the Bobby we voted for.

Moller describes the post thusly

Even some of the governor's harshest critics were impressed.

In Jan Moller's world, the Governor's "harshest critics" not only voted for him but also "reference" this fact via bumper sticker.

We've discovered a replacement term for "Hacktacular"

And it is.. Molleresque


Previous tales of the Molleresque here and here.

What is up with Jan Moller?

Moller spent much of the Gubernatorial election writing stories which read like Jindal campaign fliers and is now apparently doing the same thing for Mary Landrieu.

Kennedy flip-flops on bill for farmers
by Jan Moller, The Times-Picayune
Wednesday October 08, 2008, 9:31 PM

BATON ROUGE -- One month before Election Day is typically not the best time for a Louisiana political candidate to lash out against legislation designed to help the state's hurricane-stricken farmers.

But that is what state Treasurer John Kennedy did last week when he sided with a conservative Oklahoma senator who single-handedly derailed a bill that sought to provide $1.1 billion in disaster aid to farmers in Louisiana and other states affected by recent natural disasters.

Kennedy's opposition to the bill -- which he now says he supports -- appears to have handed his Democratic opponent in the Senate race, Mary Landrieu, an easy campaign issue in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 4 election.

It's not that I'm inclined to disagree with the point being made here, it's just that Moller tends to report political stories in an unmistakably loaded tone. Readers expect to see this in editorials or on blogs where the author's bias is more or less in the open. We usually don't expect to see it in the reporting.... unless the reporting is being done by Jan Moller.