Conservativa

Just in time for Spring. There is, out there in the Virginia blogosphere, a fake opinion blog that I am guessing is being written at the behest of a candidate for office in an upcoming election in Virginia. I stumbled over it - the link was not sent to me by any campaign. And what follows is my opinion, and I could be wrong. No, I’m not giving the link. Let’s review some things about this fine specimen of the blogging art.

1. The visual format is standard/well-done. No rookie mistakes at all. But also no graphics, photos, etc. to lend personality.
2. Writing quality overall too good to be from an inexperienced writer.
3. Overall tone of the writing: uneven. Mostly boilerplate, but then it flares into mini-rants.
4. Peculiar set of RSS feeds and links in the blogroll. Indicative of a wish to get read and get links in return, rather than expressive of a person with a point of view.
5. It has been up and running less than a year.
6. The author is pseudonymous.

(There’s one more thing which I have not listed, and it’s the real giveaway). The presence of all these things together sets off my B.S. detector.

The blog I’m talking about I believe is a blog launched by one candidate, quietly, to get itself established and maybe linked to while the “author” makes conventional posts from time to time. Then, when it’s the right point in the campaign, some “spectacular” story can be launched from it. There will be reporters who will be taken in by the story, because they don’t know any better. They won’t have had enough experience in reading the blogs to discern that this whole blog is (I believe) a campaign plant. By the time the more careful reporters have sniffed around the blog and gotten a whiff of something not right, whatever “story” the blog will have launched will be in the wild, doing its damage, regardless of its veracity.

If the writer of that blog reads this and makes an effort to fix the things I listed above, to make the blog more “authentic,” he won’t be successful, for two reasons:

1. he can’t show his name (though he could make one up; or pretend to be a team of bloggers);
2. he can’t fix the writing tone any more than a tone-deaf person can sing on key. The author is essentially trying to write dialect, but he doesn’t have the ear for it. That is not fixable.

Blogging is writing. If you launch a blog, it will be read by other bloggers. We are writers. We love the written word. But if you start your blog by hiding who you are, and then try to inflict ersatz rant-lets upon us, especially in what looks like a transparent attempt to get set up for influencing reporters during an upcoming election, don’t be surprised if we go after you like Simon Cowell savaging some feckless wannabe warbling “Feelings” on American Idol.

Moreover, while I have been known to complain about reporters like Jeff Schapiro, he loves language too, and when he’s “on,” he’s pretty good. He sometimes does his homework and he is capable of good writing. If someone like Schapiro calls you out in the Times-Dispatch, or Tim Craig does so in the Washington Post, the calling-out will make you look very foolish.

I sincerely hope the campaign involved will drop that blog effort (if that’s what it is, and I have no proof, just intuition), and that other campaigns that are beginning such efforts will also drop them. Just walk away and stop posting.