My lunch with Delano

A year and a half ago, KDKA political analyst Jon Delano and I sat at the Pittsburgh Hilton for a chat on politics and the blogosphere.

During it, he said that the blogosphere was, in a word, developing and he was quite skeptical of the validity of material flowing through it. Here's what I wrote:

The main problem inherent in the system is due to the fact that bloggers are free to write whatever they want – that there’s no test for truth. In mainstream journalism, however, assertions need to be checked and double checked for accuracy. A journalist, he said, would say, “I want to know it to be true.”

Today he and I had lunch at the cafeteria at Gateway center. For him it was the chili (with crackers) and for me the egg salad. I'm hoping the chili was as nice as my egg salad (so good you could plotz). Anyway, he's changed his views somewhat on the blogosphere. He's even got his own.

His views changed mostly because of the Lamont/Lieberman primary race in Connecticut. That race made him at least less skeptical of the power and role of the blogosphere in contemporary politics.

The main role of the blogs up in that race was to give credibility to Lamont as a challenger. Once he was seen as a credible challenger, then the more traditional news media began to pay attention. He said that blogs can identify races early on - that's one of their strengths.

It's obvious from what he said that there's still some room to go - while blogs do have more power than traditional news media wants to admit, they're not yet at the point where, for example, TV news producers read them regularly.

For the record, he frequently reads Drudge, the daily kos and (ahem) us.

He did say that it remains to be seen whether the local blogs will have an impact on the local races. So much of that plays on the perception of credibility that's created by TV news coverage. If a TV news producer can't be convinced that there's an actual race, then there's little or no coverage. What's required is evidence (number of TV ads, lots of yard signs, etc) to convince a news outlet to cover a race.

He did have a few questions about the blogosphere overall. Who's reading which blogs? Is it just liberals reading liberal blogs and conservatives conservative blogs? Are all those people just speaking to themselves?

He did have a word or two on the recent Casey/Santorum debates. He said that if anything they showed that while Casey tried to go on the attack, he just couldn't compete with Santorum in terms of fiery debate rhetoric. He couldn't match Rick's "anger." The more passionate Anti-Santorum folks, Delano said, tend to cringe when they hear Casey speak - they want him to be the "democratic Rick Santorum" with a little more sound and fury.

The ironic thing, he said, is that if Casey wins it'll be precisely because he's not Rick Santorum.

It was a good lunch, egg salad and all

Jon Delano