hard deadlines

Slow news day in Portsmouth, so I'll take this opportunity for a bit of puffery: hard deadlines is now a featured blog on Huffington Post's citizen-journalism politics section called OffTheBus. Here's the blurb:

OffTheBus (OTB) is a citizen-powered and -produced presidential campaign news site sponsored by the Huffington Post and NewAssignment.Net. Inspired by Timothy Crouse's "Boys On The Bus," an account of the 1972 contest between Nixon and McGovern that chronicles a campaigns' ability to manipulate the press and orchestrate campaign coverage, OTB was founded to better presidential campaign reporting. The project depends, in large part, on its on-the-ground citizen reporters and on cutting-edge distributed reporting techniques.

Why do I love reading OffTheBus? In a mediated political reality where "analysts" are tweaked by the Pentagon and the President's own press secretary knows he's lying, the mainstream media no longer has the presumptive advantage of "access." In fact, the coziness required to stay right with King George puts these folks at a disadvantage. Citizen journalists, like the citizen-statespeople who formed this country, aren't bought into the game, so they can speak their mind. I'm chuffed to be (along with RI Future) bringing a Rhode Island perspective to their blogroll.

BTW — if you haven't read "The Boys on the Bus," this election season would be a good time. Crouse and Hunter S. Thompson both covered the 1972 campaign, and you can see, in these two books, where the American political process began to seriously go off the rails.