Phoenix Woman details the fun with partisanship that the RNC is engaging in. Long story short: relatively evenhanded liberal webmagazines like the Minnesota Independent aren’t able to get press credentials, but resident Minnesota righty troll Tom Swift is.
Swift, a former GOP-endorsed candidate for St. Paul School Board, does have a blog, which he does occasionally update. But he’s best known for mean-spirited trolling, like the time he told me to kill myself. And I’m hardly unique in receiving that call.
Saying he’s pond scum is an affront to Chlorophyta. He’s a hack, and a horrible human being, but more important, he’s quite simply not a journalist. He’s a bomb-thrower, and a troll, but not a journalist.
But the GOP doesn’t want journalists at its convention, it wants people willing to toe the party line. And while Swiftee is at times incoherent and always full of fury, he’s willing to toe the GOP party line. And the GOP has declared, once and for all, that it would rather have a writer who advocates death to his opponents covering the convention than writers who might dare to say something negative.
I guess you haven’t heard of the difficulties that many black bloggers are facing in getting credentials to the Democrats convention. This has nothing to do with journalism, because blogging isn’t journalism.