Yesterday, Montana Maven pointed me to Jay Rosen’s recent entry on Huffington Post. Jay, together with Arianna Huffington, is searching for ways to get more people to “Participate in Politics by Covering the Campaign”. It is a great idea, which I wish them luck in, but that also raises a few concerns.

Back in January, I wrote a New Year’s resolution post for Gather.com. It was part of my preparation for Journalism that Matters conversation in Memphis. My resolution was to “to help people find their voice”. In Memphis, I refined it further to become, “to help the voiceless find their voice”.

I hope that Jay and Arianna’s efforts will help people find their voice in the political discourse. However, I worry that it might be the same rich white ivy school educated young men that I run into on the blogs and the conferences across our country. I worry that the discourse might end up being not substantially different from the nasty, horse race, Coke or Pepsi type coverage that we see in the traditional mainstream media.

I touched upon this a little in my blog entry about the National Conference on Media Reform, which happened concurrently with the Journalism that Matters conversation in Memphis. I commented there:

the two session I like best were “There is No Media Justice Without Women: Models for Feminist Media Action” and “Make the Music with Your Mouth Kid: Hip-Hop Activism for Media Justice” I was disappointed that more of the ivy league educated young straight white men were not at these sessions, because I do believe that the most exciting media reform is coming out of these sessions.

Can we get a little hip-hop action covering the 2008 Presidential campaign? That is what I want to see. Can we get the wisdom of a seventy eight year old grandmother from the plains states mixed in with that? That would truly be beautiful.

If we want to bring about real media reform, we should start with an idea like Jay and Arianna’s and bring it together with blogs written by AARP members and Third World Majority bloggers.

We also need to change the dialog. Back in September, 2005, I wrote about The New Orleans Metaphor saying:

It is my dream that just as Freedom Riders hopped on buses over forty years ago to help bring equality to blacks in the south we will see a new generation of people head to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild and help fight poverty.

The following month, Sen. Edwards came to Yale as part of his Opportunity Rocks effort. Here are a few comments I had from that event:

At Yale, I ran into a few old friends from the Dean campaign. I did my same rant with each of them. If Senator Edwards does the standard leftover politics, I will be disappointed, but not surprised. I sure hope, however, that he will really talk about a new generation of Freedom Riders.
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Senator Edwards said all the right things, talking about a movement, led by college students to touch the national consciousness and address the growing problem of poverty.
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So, will we see a new generation of Freedom Riders? Will they document the plight of poor in America, generating great work like the writers from the WPA? Will we see a 21st Century equivalent of ‘Let us now praise famous men’? Will this result in a drastic reduction in poverty?

Let us hope so.

So, if we can get an army of hip-hop artists and retired bloggers writing about the 2008 Presidential campaign, can we get them to write about issues that matters? Poverty in their own back yards (and not just in the ninth district?) How the war in Iraq affects them at home? The battle to get adequate health care?

When I blogged about the Libby Trial, I asked people what they would like to see me writing about. David Weinberger responded:

What Aldon will blog is not reportage—in fact, it assumes good reporting is being done—but it's also not mere opinion or editorial. It is perspective.

I hope that I added new perspectives to the coverage of the Libby Trial. I hope that my blogging here, adds new perspective to a multiplicity of issues and I hope that Jay and Arianna have success with their new venture and the success brings many new perspectives.