Today the Bangor Daily News ran an article about the Allen-Collins race, and especially the influence of the internet and blogs in the race. The article mentions Lance Dutson, Collins' Internet Campaign Manager, and Richard Nixon in the same thought, which I got quite the kick out of. Here's an excerpt from the Bangor Daily News.
"Blog readership is on a massive incline," Dutson said. The biggest demographic of blog readers is 40-to-50-year-old males, he said.
But as Richard Nixon famously learned by failing to appreciate that he looked like a shady used-car salesman on TV, the Internet is also fraught with potential pitfalls for candidates.
Dutson, in one of his postings, referred to the liberal opinion site firedoglake.com as a "foul-mouthed fem-blog." That drew the ire of the left, who called for Collins to fire Dutson for using what they saw as sexist terms. Dutson counters by pointing to the Chicago Tribune’s feminist blog, which the newspaper labels a "fem-blog."
Pretty weak justification if you ask me. But wait...is there really a feminist blog on the Chicago Tribune webpage? a pretty weak justification.
Well as far as I can tell, there isn't. Here's the Chicago Tribune blog page which doesn't list any staff blog with the word Feminist or Fem-blog. Nor after consulting the google was I able to find a feminist blog on the Chicago Tribune website. I was however, able to find this reference to fem-blog on the Chicago Tribune site.
Date: Friday, June 03, 2005
FEM-BLOG WATCH
My friends in the WomanNews section are preparing to launch a new feature that samples and excerpts blogs by, for or about women, and they asked me for my recommendations.
I passed along a few names from my blogroll, but recommended that they ask you, blog readers, for your input. So...
Which blogs by, for or about women do you enjoy most?
I searched through the whole site and was able to find nothing. Duston is using this small reference to fem-blog as his justification for using the term to slander the ladies at FDL. Even if there is a fem-blog section that I wasn't able to find, it's still a very weak justification.
Cross-posted at TurnMaineBlue.com