(Originally published in Greater Democracy)

When bloggers descended upon the Democratic Convention, the bloggers were a big part of the news story. Everyone questioned how journalistic bloggers would be, and in the end, the mainstream press seemed to dismiss the bloggers. They didn’t break any important news stories. David Weinberger even questioned a Pulitzer Prize winner how we could adjust for his biases if he wouldn’t even admit to them. The mainstream media particularly rankled at such questions.

Yet all of this greatly over simplifies the process. Everyone does have a bias and it comes through in their writing. An import aspect of blogs are their immediacy. By this, I don’t necessarily mean how quickly things get written. Sometimes bloggers have difficulty getting to a good WiFi hotspot to put up their posts. Sometimes, they spend a bit of time trying to recuperate from their experiences before they can put their post together. However, they have a greater sense of immediacy in the more traditional sense of the word. They are less mediated by editorial boards or efforts to make a very emotional experience falsely seem objective.

Last night, I was hanging out at The Tank’s blogger alley. This is where many of us bloggers that didn’t get press credentials from the RNC or didn’t want to pay to use space in Madison Square Garden are gathering to cover the convention.

It was hot and noisy there. They had PBS being projected on the wall and people, similar to how they post comments to blogs, were yelling back at some of the stupid comments Republicans were making. (I’m sure that if I were being journalist, or being properly edited by a main stream editor, my description of some of the comments by Republicans as stupid would get removed; an illustration, but a digression).

As I left The Tank, I ran into Anna from Annatopia. If you want to know her biases, look at the counter ‘until President Kerry is elected’ or ‘Download Howard Dean’s Iowa Speech’. Anna is not somewhat that is mediated. She tells it the way she experiences it, and this week, she is telling some of her experiences at Majority Report Radio

She was, to use her words, ‘still processing the events of this afternoon, and … a bit disjointed and worn out’. I listened to her experiences of being with a march on Monday, starting at the U.N. and moving to Madison Square Garden. Her description of the march is should be required reading.

This morning, I received in the mail a pointer to this article about the same march. This is the sort of poor reporting which illustrates why blogs are so important. It starts off with, “A march against the Bush administration turned ugly Monday”. As a parent who has often experienced squabbles between children, one of the first questions I always ask is, what happened just before this. Apparently, the news reporter wasn’t there, didn’t think to ask this question, or didn’t want to present the full story. Anna’s first hand description of the event fills in a lot of missing pieces.

The article describes a policeman that was knocked unconscious in the fray. While we all deplore this, there is no mention of the protestors who got ‘their skulls cracked’. Nor is there any mention of the protestors support for the police, particularly in terms of ‘the speaker said, "I want you all to look around at the heros of 9-11 who are here to protect us. Look at them and realise they are working without a contract!" The crowd erupted into cheers; it was a beautiful show of solidarity with the police force.’

Of course the biases of the AP reporter shows through in a following line, ‘The unrest occurred a day after tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets’. Even the most conservative crowd estimates place the crowd in the hundreds of thousands.

While neither report is necessarily fair and balanced, at least Anna doesn’t make false pretenses about being objective. By reading the blogs, you can get a more complete view of what is really going on and think critically about all the stories.