Bloggers are too important for Romanoff to ignore
Andrew Romanoff isn’t reading this blog post.
He doesn’t read blogs, he told The Denver Post.
The Post’s Bill Husted: Are there perceptions people have of you that need correcting or some explanation?
Romanoff: If you are in public life, you read about yourself …- making decisions you never made or doing things you never did or saying things you never said. One of the best decisions I ever made was, the day I announced, was to stop reading the blogs. The anonymous nature of the blogosphere liberates authors from truth, so people just start making things up.
Husted: How were you treated by the press in general?
Romanoff: We could have done a more effective job of engaging the press in policies. The press was kind of sold on the story that there were no policy differences. And that was factually false. My sense is that the press is short staffed. Journalism is falling under hard times. I’m not going to second guess their decisions now. It doesn’t do much good to whine about that. But if nobody is covering your press conferences, it could be a problem with your communications strategy.
I like Romanoff, and I actually like him even more after reading his great interview with The Post yesterday. He can be an inspiring politician. But swearing off blogs at the young age of 44? That’s not a good idea, especially if he wants to be an insurgent candidate.
Blogs, like other human creations, need to be evaluated one at a time. Romanoff might find one blogger credible (perhaps moi?) and the next blogster a piece of shit. If anonymity bothers you, peruse the ones that have real bylines. So you read the ones you like.
Also, of course, almost every journalist is a blogger these days. If Romanoff takes himself seriously on this, he’ll be left reading only the books that he’s boxing up as we speak.
As for Romanoff’s criticsim of the news coverage of his race, I think he makes a fair point, to a degree, but he’d have to be more specific about what he thought was under-emphasized and by which media. He had different policy positions than Bennet, to be sure.