Yeah, I blog. That does not make me media, and it does not make me informed, intelligent, or rational. It does make me a person with a big mouth, and an audience that might just possibly be listening– which means I’m no different from any other blogger.

Don’t get me wrong- I don’t have a huge amount of respect for today’s mainstream media, particularly after hearing some of the cowardly things that are going on in Lebanon (“Just stay in your comfy hotel room, guys, and let the natives handle it. They’re used to getting killed. Sure, they’ll give you the straight story!” Tracers.**)

** if you didn’t get that, go back and watch Chasing Amy.

But some of the things in the blogosphere really gripe me. Like the activist citizen media – or as I like to call them, bloggers with a cause. Specifically, I hate the way they adopt any sufficiently dramatic issue and use it to promote their own agenda.

Case in point: there’s a nice little city I happen to love called New Orleans. It had a little old flood not too long ago that did all kinds of nasty things to the city. Not the party and nightclub section – that part was mostly okay and still serves Hurricanes (mmm, Hurricanes) with your breakfast scrambled eggs and white gravy. But with any city, it’s the people that make up the town, not the buildings.

A bunch of homes were destroyed– a hundred percent loss in some neighborhoods– depriving those people of a place to live. Perhaps as many as two thousand people were killed just in the city and surrounding areas, and more bodies are being discovered even now a year later. Half or more of the city’s population is still evacuated, with many more waiting in FEMA trailers for their homes to be rebuilt. Horrible. Almost unimaginable, really.

Seems to me that the tragedy in New Orleans didn’t really require any exploitation. The bloggers down there, a very active and respectable community, might just have needed a little help getting their message out. They’ve been living with the carnage and wreckage and sewage and all the other “ages” for just under a year. They have pictures galore. They have news to report, positive and negative, on what’s being done. They are informed, and they know the truth in the situation– the real New Orleans truth.

But there’s a segment of the blogging world that just can’t leave this alone. They didn’t help out the New Orleans bloggers in the most simple and rational of manners– by linking to them, or by cross-posting their best blogs on well-trafficked sites. You’ll find some of them at the interestingly-named NewOrleansTruth.com.

Not satisfied with the news coming to them in Los Angeles (primarily), they apparently feel that they have to go down and blog for themselves about it. I guess they aren’t seeing enough New Orleans truth out there. You gotta wonder– what are they reading? Are they looking at the New Orleans blogs? Have they helped these guys out?

No. In all the blogs belonging to these folks, I have yet to find one that really talks about a Nola (that’s shorthand for the New Orleans area, all y’all who don’t know) blogger’s blogsite. (For that matter only two- Chartreuse and 1938Media- seem to be actual real bloggers; the others: recruited for the cause, I’m guessing?) There are now links to some Nola bloggers at NewOrleansTruth.com, but only after it was pointed out loudly and voluminously that this was a Gaping Omission in a site theoretically devoted to the Truth.

Where in any of the NOT blogs can you read a promo for a Nola blogger who has demonstrated exemplary – and real – citizen journalism? Or one asking for help? You’d think that citizen journalists would at least read stuff by other citizen journalists. If they’re so damned concerned about it, they should be talking about it, and should have been talking about it for the last year. They also should have read some of the marvelous coverage given the New Orleans scene by Nola bloggers.

You’d think that if they were gung-ho about going down to see the damage and promote a fix, that they’d also be interested in promoting more awareness of what’s going on for real.

Nope. Nary a word.

How about a link on the NOT sites providing a place to donate to the New Orleans cleanup? Or maybe letter templates to write to congressmen or the media, demanding more action.

Hmm. That’s not there either. Gasp. Shock. Dismay.

In fact, there’s not a damn thing on the NOT-affiliated sites that will help the folks in New Orleans in any kind of responsible, material manner. Nada. Zilch. Zip.

Instead, they are dissing the Nola bloggers. Clearly, their carpetblogging actions state, Nola folks aren’t getting the truth across. These poor little victimized people of New Orleans are idiots. It takes a real blogger, someone from a Civilized City like L.A., to come out and help these poor hayseeds. (Tongue very firmly in cheek indeed!)

Here’s my prediction. First, they will go down and take nothing but negative pictures. There will be no pics of the incredible work Nola residents and hordes of fantastic volunteers have done to clean up the city– sanitizing the fishy carnage of the Audubon Aquarium and reopening it, or repairing the damage to the Superdome, or making the streets of the Ninth Ward drivable again, or reviving the city in time for Mardi Gras this year– a truly Herculean task.

Instead, there will be hordes of pictures of all the places that still need work, and tragic stories about all the people who have been forgotten. Sure, that’s important. In no way am I saying that the tens of thousands who still need help should be ignored. However, if you don’t look at the good that has been done already, you’re not getting the whole picture, are you?

These images will be used for two different purposes: first, to Promote A Political Agenda. We all have political agendas, of course. But this Political Agenda will be specifically to attack Bush and the Republican party, while explicitly not criticizing what the Democrats running Louisiana have done, or rather not done. There will be not a single gripe about Nagin’s atrocious decision not to evacuate; instead, the federal government not doing enough will be the centerpiece of this bitchfest. This despite the profusion of blame to spread around to everyone. That’s because part of their agenda is to attack Republicans, particularly Bush (and you can find that easily by reading their blogs).

Isn’t it cheating to go to someone else’s backyard and bitch about what a rotten job has been done there? Aren’t there problems in OUR OWN BACKYARDS that need bitching about? And if there aren’t, maybe some praise and thanksgiving for our good fortune is in order as we WRITE A CHECK to an appropriate rebuilding charity instead of spending that money to travel down to New Orleans.

That brings me to my other gripe. A donation made in secret, in private, is true charity. Marching a parade down the street to hand your hundred-dollar check over to the Salvation Army or Goodwill or whoever is not. Is the motivation behind this much-talked-about project charity, or is it something else? Instead of holding out his hands for anyone wanting to donate to the cause of his going down to New Orleans, could Chartreuse not collect a few dimes to put in the bank accounts of the charities down there? There’s something very wrong with this picture.

Deep Breath Here So I Can Mount The Soapbox

Citizen journalism should be done in your own backyard, where you know the community. That’s the grassroots strength that powers the blogosphere. Let news agencies dispatch journalists to other places.

Think about it- who knows New Orleans’ problems better than someone who lives in New Orleans? The best blogs on Iraq come from guys who are stationed there or from Iraqis who live there. And you can’t possibly hope to understand the mindset of the Lebanese or the Israelis by visiting there for a week or two; it takes someone who’s grown up around it, or who has lived the story. That’s what blogs are about – hearing about someone else’s life, their experiences bringing a profundity to the news that you can’t get in any other way. They are, in many ways, an offshoot of memoirs. Hijacking someone else’s story to promote your own blog is, frankly, just wrong. (Besides, is your life really so boring that you have to go steal someone else’s?)

Since I’ve predicted certain types of abuse by NewOrleansTruth, they may not happen. We may see positive blogs coming out of NOT, and I’d love to be proven wrong in this manner. I doubt I will. I think every single post will be negative, with little or nothing said about the rebuilding that has happened. And I’ll get viciously attacked by NOT and its supporters for writing this blog***, and some Nola folks will come out and say nice things, and all the other stuff I just predicted will come true.

***bring it on!

What’s wrong with this? As long as the public thinks New Orleans (poor, poor New Orleans) is wallowing in its own tragedy, the vast and generous spirit of the city cannot properly recover. Worse, tourist dollars will stay away, perhaps permanently crippling the economy. And there’s no reason for it. The French Quarter is in excellent shape. Many of New Orleans’ other attractions – the food, the music, the Audubon park complexes, the drinking, the ahem adult sections, and the beautiful, friendly people– are also in good shape. How much of tourism can be predicted by people’s perceptions of conditions, as opposed to the reality? What do you think?

My point is that this sort of blogging– doom and gloom, what’s bad about New Orleans– is worse for the city by far than just leaving it alone. Let’s hope that we get through the anniversary of Katrina with a minimum of doom and start talking about what’s right with New Orleans, like the thousands of students who came down on their spring breaks to help fix the city, and the tough and resilient spirit of the people that won’t let an icon they call home die.

As far as NewOrleansTruth and company- let’s watch, shall we? And sneer. At least a little. It’s good exercise for our faces.

NOT, prove me wrong – please

*Oh, and a sweetener, hat tip to GulfSails for pointing this out in his blog: one of Chartreuse’s backers, Know More Media, is even committed to paying these bloggers for their daily posts. How generous of everyone. Nola bloggers are Not Happy. A little reminder, one more time, of New Orleans charities, courtesy Instapundit.

**A second sweetener: the NOT tour was scheduled to happen Next Weekend as of August 2. It’s nearly the end of August, and it ain’t happened yet. What’s up with that?

***Sigh. This is starting to hurt my teeth. Am I really supposed to believe that there is no profit (financial or otherwise) being made on NOT’s site when there’s such nice, clean promo for Discovery Channel all over it? I wonder if they know about this picture, showcased for us in lieu of a thousand words at Chartreuse’s post on Team New Orleans, a response, as the text below the picture shows, to those who think his mission is a “waste of time.” Like, um, the Nola bloggers – who are also New Orleans victims?

Remember them, the citizens of New Orleans?

I do.

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