The Screening Room
Bloggers: Insightful minds or a bunch of bull?
By Jimi Izrael
Bloggers Gina McCauley and Shwana Ruth-Bridges
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Do Bloggers Really Know What They're Talking About?
Print journalists give bloggers short shrift, and bloggers like Gina McCauley of WhatAboutOur Daughters.com may be the reason why. McCauley, from Austin, Texas is probably one of my favorite bloggers. An ‘01 grad from Duke Law, she’s wicked smart, if sometimes, her kitchen sink approach to making arguments is equal parts Don Quixote and Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons: both informative and fun to watch. Her relentless swagger is undeniable. I’m such a fan of her work, I put her name on a short list of dream panelists for a panel on bloggers I was asked to moderate during the NABJ Watergate Conference on Political and Congressional Reporting in Washington DC. She accepted and flew herself in. It would be me, her, Amy Alexander of The Nation and Dr. Lester Spence of John Hopkins University. How cool is that?
While Gina and I are aware of each other’s work and I even interviewed her for my site some time ago, she and I have no personal relationship. As is my custom with things like this, I reached out to all the panelists by phone, and Gina was no exception. I let her know that while I take shots at her methods and her message sometimes, that it wasn’t personal and I’m a big fan of her work and hopeful she would offer journalists married to print and the 5 Ws a different perspective. “You called me the Crazy Cat Lady,” she deadpanned from left-field. Not knowing she’d been injured by my ribbing, I apologized profusely. The conversation ended well, and I felt confident that we’d buried that hatchet. I was sure it was going to be a great panel.
A week or so later, we started the panel at 10:30 on the dot, and at 10:33, in the context of her introduction she informed the attendees that not only had I called her a Crazy Cat Lady, but that I was a “black woman hater and misogynist… who I have just been informed via an operative on Twitter is raping the personage of Mama Robinson on The Root.com.” I know the exact time because she patted herself on the back, via Twitter: “fighting with jimi izrael,” she Tweets. “just called him a black woman hating misogynist from mobile web at 10:35.”
Back offline, this was the “Oh Shit” moment you have at every cocktail party, family get together, card game or cabaret: you have invited one person too many. This was the moment I knew inviting Gina McCauley to be the face of new media was a mistake.
 Not because she proceeded to disrupt the panel by insulting the panelists, attendees (one of whom, one of the founders of the NABJ), the organizers and making sister-girl faces to communicate her contempt. It wasn’t her attempt to wrestle the role of moderator from me, which evidently she doesn’t understand (@faboomama “It donned(sic) on me that I had never been on a panel where the moderator thought their role was to dominate and control the panel,” she says, via Twitter). It was the fact that she was confirming the portrait of bloggers as brilliant, angry, obsessive people holed up in their basements eating Cheetos and cupcakes, railing against The Man, hurling clever insults, threatening to boycott everything and anything.
Smart enough to acquire multiple advanced degrees, but outside of a chat-room or a comments section, they lack the sophistication or raw people skills to dialog intellectually and therefore, cannot be taken seriously. This, too often, is the blogger’s paradox. It’s why reporters and trained journalists don’t want to blog, be confused with bloggers, or known exclusively as a blogger. Me included. Newspapers and magazines have blogged-up, so that boat has left, and Gina is throwing cats at it from just off-shore.
The panel was an hour of The Gina McCauley Show, and it became painfully obvious that not only does she need this kind of attention, that this is the kind of attention she prefers, and she is apparently willing to travel across country to get it. The entire reason she came to Washington DC was to fight. Before she heads off for a Thanksgiving dinner (?!) she congratulates herself via Twitter: “met some new people made a full grown man scream like a ma in front of his colleagues like a child is gravy!!” Gravy, indeed.
Gina’s modus operandi, evidently, is to incite a consensus around an impossibly alarming thesis like “Why are McDonalds, Nissan and the Army Whoring Our Daughters?” buttress her stance with as many arguments as possible, stir vigorously and heat to a boil. Many bloggers try this: Gina’s does it to great effect. For her, this method works. She makes some great arguments and she throws them like feral cats from a pillow case-but no one can deny her effectiveness as an agent of change.
 I hoped in vain she would bring insight into her methods and her relationship with traditional media to the panel. Instead, her insistence on disrupting the panel and diverting the dialog to a personal agenda was emblematic of a problem trained objectivists have with bloggers: they are smart enough and well-intentioned, but blogs are often manic Google-traps trying to get click-throughs for ad nickels, so over-done and egomaniacal that many of them can’t dialog beyond the basement. Gina didn’t flout that stereotype: she chose to validate it.
 It was a wasted opportunity to build bridges and fire dialog instead of conflict. It’s telling and Freddy Krueger-frightening that, in this economy, someone would buy a ticket across country just to put someone on blast. Seems easier and cheaper to just stay home and blog it out. What was she hoping to get out of it? In her Twitter feed, between all the catty insults and observations, she talks about being on the panel to take on “Old Media” and push back against the notion of bloggers as internet kooks and unprofessional, unreliable, untrained writers and reporters.
Good job.
“Witnessing that panel,” said Amy Alexander, “is one of the reasons I have trepidation about setting up a blog or joining the blogosphere. It’s the same thing with a lot of traditional journalists, because this is the kind of discourse you’re getting.”
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I think a lot of bloggers have delusions of grandeur and they seek attention online that they wouldn’t normally receive offline.
> [FUNG'KE] [BLAK] [CHIK]
I don’t think blogs should be singled out, because what this really all boils down to is professionalism. People who take what they do seriously, whether running a blog or reporting for a newspaper, realize that there is some measure of responsibility for anything you put out there for mass consumption.
On the other hand, plenty of other people show their asses for ad dollars and ratings in both traditional and non-traditional media every single day. Cable news is full of characters like that!
My only other comment is that if Ms. McCauley gets off on this type of attention as you claim she does, you probably shouldn’t have mentioned her or her site on here by name. That’s going to increase her visibility more than it will damage her reputation. As they say…All press is good press.
> ListenToLeon
…yet, you keep giving your shine; if she’s that bugged, I suggest you stop writing about her.
> Michael A. Gonzales
[...] is in that mindset that the article over at BlackPower.com frustrates me. Granted, Gina is used as a lightening rod, but I think NPR and The Root journalist [...]
> A Troubled Marriage: Journalism and Blogging | Black Web 2.0
[...] the sun–why he chose this moment in history to mount a crusade of sorts remains a mystery. Like alot of people I know, a little temperance could serve him well. I said something similar when me, Meeshee, Diggy, [...]
> The Hardline according to Jimi Izrael : The Wright Choice
I think alot of bloggers have passion and they really do write some thought provoking material. Just loke with professional journalist, they get facts wrong, plus they have to be politically correct ya know.
BJ
http://www.MycharlotteRadio.com
> BJ Murphy
If it wasn’t for bloggers and their platforms, we, the Black populace, would still be voiceless–silenced, sequestered from being heard. I am speaking of us who respond to bloggers and debate with them or others. Blogs have offered us DEMOCRACY and sometimes it is ugly but so is life ugly and messy at times. The criticism against bloggers is routed in what I think is jealousy. As I remember, Benjamin Franklin hated being sequestered from having a public voice at such a young age that he created an alias of woman named Silence Dogood. He had to be improper because he could not “get in”. He had ideas and he felt stifled from being forced to be silent.
For years I was frustrated with “Black Journalists”. They are like most Black Professionals that talk about wanting to be liberating and innovative in their professions but they are so trained by their profession to audition a constant and restrained coolness and appropriateness of approval by Establishments. They would cover stories or not consider pitches from me about very important ideas relevant to the Black Community that had no space or language for even dialogue yet but I would see the ruling community discussing. I saw that our journalists were slow. They wanted so badly to mimick the controls instead stimulating for innovation. Bloggers figured out how to do it.
I don’t know Gina but I kinda’ have a feeling why she operated the way she did. There are things innovative women know but don’t have a microphone to talk about of controlled environments of Establishment Brokers leveraging brokerage. People expect you play along and act grateful. Sometimes it is condescending. Maybe that was what she felt. I know other women who have felt the same way but can’t extol because there is no space–not even on blogs yet because the audiences are too ignorant or kept from the intellectual complexity of understanding what power struggling is among a lot of strivers who may be the Establishment and those that interlope on their turf.
She obviously was frustrated before she arrived but even in the space she created, it either had not gained the credibility for her to have the effective power she know she should have amassed. Black Journalists are like Black Professors who submit to the constant rat race and hazing of trying to prove they are good enough and fundamental members of the profession. I like that she did not give a damn of possibly offending. Her blog is about Black female promotion of power. I guess she should have been nicer and more appropriate striving to liberate herself at the journalists’ conference.
Whereas journalists of all colors are having to reconsider where they fit in, they can hate bloggers for not being proper and “professional” but the bloggers have created a space. Many have tried to simply strike gold for attention and need for approval but there are so many great blogs that create product most Black papers and Black Journalists I knew/know don’t have the ingenuity to replicate or do beforehand.
Just here in finding this product last night, I finally feel that soemone found the niche I fit in. There is not a newspaper or print magazine out here that has been able to do that for me since the original Honey magazine closed and Essence lost it’s soul in the 80’s.
What Gina was doing was offering open transparency in her ability to text her dimensional thoughts and the closed information most of us are never privy too. The Black Community desperately needs transparently and when one person is “outed” or embarrassed by a challenge from someone they think she operate with them in the same closed behavior of communication, they automatically think the person is UNPROFESSIONAL or CRAZY. What Gina was doing was offering transparency in real-time which is innovative. We, Blacks, don’t like transparency because we have been trained since living to survive on the plantation to never be open and never show our cards. I love that she conceptualized how to deal with her frustrations of our limitations to be open. Her behavior was obviously rating the event as what it was: a conspiracy to draw a line between bloggers and journalists who don’t have what it takes to blog. Blogging and being good at it requires the stomach to take risks. That is something even I don’t have and I am a person that challenges bloggers that hit intellectual thresholds but want to act like they are leaders.
So I endorse Gina just like I endorse this fantastic creation here. Go http://www.BlackPower.com. I am so happy for you all that had the courage and ingenuity to create what…(cough)Black Journalists…obviously with all of their credence could not.
> Andrea
Andrea says “I don’t know Gina” and then goes on to endorse her rudeness and insanity.
Truth is, something is horribly wrong with Gina. Read her blog.
She puts out the following lies:
a. Black folks teach black boys to mistreat black women
b. Black men are damaged beyond repair
c. Black men are “out to get” and destroy black women.
d. White men will save the day for black women.
e. Black women need to go find a white man for their own safety and survival.
If you don’t believe me, read her blog. It’s all there. She accuses black men of hating black women. She has it twisted. SHE hates black men.
And I can see why. She is a very angry woman. She is obese with huge granny boobs and she’s only in her 30’s with no children.
I doubt that black men are knocking down her doors—-or white men for that matter. But white men don’t get her ire. It’s brothers.
Sick woman belonging to a sick movement headed by a sick chick named “Evia”. Turn into a white man. She will love you.
> Dalia
Gina McCauley of WhatAboutOur Daughters.com
LOL
No wonder she is mad about black men.
This is going to be good material for my blog.
Mr Laurelton Queens
> Mr Laurelton Queens
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