Gee, I'm right here in DC and only a Metro ride away from Brookings.  But noticing any female "liberal" bloggers besides Wonkette just isn't on the media's agenda.

But here's the thing.  Prominent Democratic bloggers have to want to do it.  In Digby's comments, Atrios said that he'd been invited to live-blog it and declined.

Now, I'll admit that liveblogging is lame.  And that's not Atrios' schtick.  But wouldn't it be better to show up and complain about not being on the panel?  Sitting at home and sulking about the unfairness of it all is really lame. I imagine some of these guys think it might be beneath them to lobby for representation (i.e. blog about it).  But that's just how things work.

You've struck a nerve I'd say.

ratings and don't care about showing balance or what is good about blogs.  In fact I think they are trying to demonize blogging.  It is a direct threat to their medium and I warn people to know what they are getting into before they get a little to caught up in getting exposure, for whatever reason.  This may hurt the blogging movement.  I find it kind of strange how in one hand people will complain about how corporate, unbalanced, lazy, uninformend, and manipulative the corporate media is.  The fact that they are part of the military industrial complex is disturbing to me and would raise questions about their motivations and intentions.

She's got a fowl mouth and is kind a cute. And she is An "A" list blogger. Someone told me she actually has a booking agent for these kinds of things. Figures.

of a P.R. man. He found talent, and set up a system to promote it.

http://www.nickdenton.org/

Wonkette did not happen from grass roots up. The fact that the person that is wonkette is talented and knowledgeable is not in dispute. Rather, I point this out because I think it relates to some of the things you are trying to do with this thread.

We have a short list of bloggers who are willing to do it. Melanie is one. And there are others.

The problem is they made no effort to reach and and find some other bloggers. How difficult is it to go to technorati and find DC bloggers who are liberal and willing to come and then send them an email?

Yeah, I thought so: it's simple. And they just didn't do that. That is what we are angry and upset about this.  

Me and Matt and a few other liberal blogggers are in the process of creating some kind of org to lobby the media for more appearences and academe settings too. We are getting there. It took the Republicans twenty years, at least. So it ain't going to happen tomorrow but it will happen. And we're working on it.

Stirling, call me if you can. I am on the phone with Matt right now. But gimme about 5 mins.

to keep the agenda of 'numero uno' in mind. They are not in existence to provide a fair hearing to bloggers. They have their own mission.

They are supposed to be a Liberal Think Tank. Are they Centrist now or Right?

This whole dust-up is BS. And seriously, does Wonkette add anything to Brookings? Fer Gawd's sake, she's a gossip columnist!

as does everyone else competing for media coverage in a media run capitalistically. (Once again, before screaming in disgust, your alternative to that is: publicly-owned media.)

P.S. I think with your efforts like this thread, you have provided them with some buzz, that's what I think.

some efforts on all this should go is to make serious coverage of news and issues marketable/profitable again. Others would rather use this for political gain. I think those two interests compete, and rather strongly.

Maybe just maybe Brookings sees that conservative bloggers and Wonkette types will get them the buzz that they have not been getting.

I even noted this here; liberal bloggers don't talk about the Brookings' Institute ideas. They talk about Wolfowitz and neo-cons and the AEI all the time! You've given them very short shrift:

You haven't helped them much at all in the past!

Anyone note their thing on Kyoto?

http://agonist.org/comments/2005/3/12/12831/7679/59#59

If I were them, I might even think that most of you think you can do it better than them.

Maybe Brookings has decided they can't win going the scholarly route, and need to participate in the continuation of talk radio(outrage/rant/emote/mud wrestle/'animal house' frat fight) that much of the blogosphere has become.

With conservative bloggers and gossip, they would get 'outrage', and, consequently, some attention?

Addendum to above post.

'We must be heard.

And title has the word "victory".

You are at war with the Brookings Institute?

It's they who have been trying to be heard just as long or longer than you.

In this vein, I really don't get why liberal bloggers are at war with what is labeled by everyone else as "the liberal media." Doesn't make much sense to me. They and you should be allies. Unfortunately, the upstairs guys constantly are telling them that the "liberal" label hurts the bottom line, so cut it out. And while that is happening, liberal bloggers constantly trying to stab them too.

The squeaky wheel gets oiled. We are under-represented and until we push back we will remain underrepresented. I just don't get what you are saying. It makes no sense. How are we supposed to tell our story in a calm raional manner if we never get the chance to tell our story. That is what this is about. Nothing more, nothing less. We just want a chance to tell it and not have ourselves defined by others.

I've been using Brookings white papers on my site since the day I went live and just added another Shibley Telhami op-ed today (their stuff is good, as is CSIS's.)  I use the think tanks all the time, but they are too stupid to notice.

Melanie

http://agonist.org/comments/2005/3/17/15657/8882?pid=12#15

There are different ways to be squeaky.

When you work in a retail situation, and a customer comes in ranting and raving that he's mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, you give him a consolation prize to make him be quiet and not scare all the other customers away.

Then there's the guy that come in and says: I have this idea how you could sell more of those things over there, why do you do it like that, if you did it like this I would buy one of these and I bet a lot of other people would too. And you take that guy over to the boss and the boss takes him out to lunch.

;-)

you're not getting my point. We tried that at first with Brooking. We've been working on this all week. We tried to come up with a win-win that wouldn't embarrass anyone or make a stink. They simply would not budge. So, we made a conscious decsion to make it an issue. We haven't screamed. We have not been ugly. We requested that callers be polite but firm. We tried everything before we chose this option, believe me.

And they left us no choice. There is nothing agressive or ulgy in the letter Matt and I wrote. We're polite. We just want to take action. And sometimes you just have to take action. It's the only way things get done.

And we won. Ruy Texiara and Laura Rozen are officially going to be there. They've already put it on the masthead. We partly won. We wanted a real liberal to sit on the panel but this will suffice for now.  

What this one person, me, sees when I see a story presented as "liberal bloggers fight Brookings Institute and win,"

or, for that matter, a story presented as "liberal blogger X" versus the "liberal media",

mostly what I see is Karl Rove's dreams coming true.

Divide and conquer.

You are a part of the media now. Still presenting as a poor fighting underdog just hits this reader like an excuse for not building coalitions.