The blogging of the President

Christopher Lydon will be hosting a radio show on NPR tonight from 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM (Eastern Time) entitled “The Blogging of the President.” Of course, there’s an associated blog. Here are links to multiple posts about tonight’s show — which has an impressive line-up of commentators from both the blogosphere (Andrew Sullivan, Jeff Jarvis, Atrios, Joshua Micah Marshall) and the mediasphere (Gary Hart, Kevin Phillips, Richard Reeves). To listen in online, go to Minnesota Public Radio’s home page. For background reading, check out this AP story on blogs and campaigns from earlier this week, and today’s essay about political “cyberbalkanization” from the New York Times. UPDATE: A few thoughts having just listened to the broadcast: 1) Christopher Lyudon is just a font of adjectives. My favorite for describing the blogosphere was “yeasty.” 2) Great (paraphrased) exchange between Jeff Jarvis and Frank Rich:

JARVIS: Frank, I’d like to see you have a blog. RICH: I can’t — I want to have a life!!

3) Jeff Jarvis also had the best line of the evening: “Bloggers don’t replace reporters; bloggers replace editors.” 4) Where the hell were Gary Hart and Kevin Phillips? [UPDATE: According to this post, “We can’t get through to Gary Hart’s number.” I have that problem too.] 5) Atrios and Sullivan had a yeasty exchange towards the end. Andrew made the point that he was willing to criticize his own side of the political spectrum, whereas Atrios would not do the same on the left. Atrios replied that simply wasn’t true, and it was clear Andrew had not read his blog. Sullivan asked Atrios to cite an episode when he had criticized someone on the left. Atrios paused and said, “Well, I can’t think of think of one right now.” 6) Scrappleface posted the following headline to a Blogging of the President real-time entry: “Public Radio Show Talks about People Who Write About What’s Written About People Who Do Little Else But Talk.” 7) A final substantive critique of the show — Neither Lydon nor any of his guests made the crucial distinction between campaign blogs and independent political blogs. The former might be more prone than the latter to the cocooning phenomenon discussed on the show. FINAL UPDATE: On a related subject, Billmon privides an exhaustive report on a Davos Economic Forum panel on the relationship between the blogosphere and the mediasphere.