Angry in the Great White North

A number of Liberal-friendly bloggers participated in a conference call set up by the Liberal Party to talk about the role of blogging and to review the new Liberal Party website, among many other things.

Jason Cherniak spearheaded the "Liberal Blog Conference Call":

Tuesday afternoon, the Liberal Party of Canada set up a conference call with a number of bloggers. The speakers included:

Mark Marissen - Campaign Co-Chair
Jamie Carroll - LPC National Director
Mike Girardin - LPC webmaster
Denise Brunsdon - YLC executive member
Kris Ade - OLO Strategic Communications

For this call, a long list of bloggers were invited. (Some have asked that their names be removed, so I have removed all of them because I think I should either provide the full list or no list.)

Well, here's the full list.

I count seventeen bloggers invited.

Only two bloggers, Jason Cherniak and the Gauntlet, saw fit to blog about the call. Not sure what that means.

First from Jason Cherniak:

I heard a lot that gives me confidence about the Liberal team around Dion. Policy development is on track for the election and people are being included from all leadership campaigns. The most detailed part of the call was when Mr. Girardin took us through the new website that is going to be launched in the not too distant future. I will not give anything away, but I think it is a big improvement and the new site should be much better at explaining the Liberal position to Canadians.

So what exactly is better about the website? We get the inside scoop from the Gauntlet:

When I heard from Jason Cherniak that people in the campaign wanted to talk to us, I assumed that it was going to be a blogger press conference - that they had something to tell us about which we would be particularly interested. That was not the case. First, the substantive portion of the meeting dealt with a new website that the Liberals are developing for the campaign. Portions of it were pertinent to bloggers. For instance, they say that they are going to add more resources for the use of bloggers, more buttons and scripts than can be dropped in our sidebars. That's fine, but I don't need to be on a national conference call with the co-chair of the campaign to hear that. For the rest of the site, any liberal might have been as interested as we were. Some of us stayed on and served as a sort of focus group for the new site. I was without internet where I was sitting, so dropped off.

Buttons?

But it is the Liberal group-think that has the Gauntlet most concerned:

I'll be honest. I was a little uncomfortable with this part of the conversation. I was also a little surprised at the comfort level of some of the other participants. There was, it seemed to me, a tacit suggestion in the air that Liberal bloggers should be deciding what to write on the basis of what would be helpful. There was also, it seemed, a tacit acceptance of that suggestion among most of the bloggers on the call.

I just hope that the campaign will not be disappointed with me if I just continue on doing what I've been doing up until now. I don't decide what to write on the basis of what would be helpful. I write what I'm thinking, and what I'm thinking is sometimes critical of the party.

I dare say the campaign will indeed be disappointed, but not your readers, so go with your gut on this one. Maybe this is what worried some of the other bloggers too. Maybe they felt that faced with the choice of recording in their blog their true thoughts or just putting in some cheerleading for the party, their only valid choice was not to say anything at all.

Makes you wonder.