Bloggers On The Bus

A Conversation About Media and Politics in the Digital Age

July 16, 2009, 5:00pm - 6:30pm

Last November’s elections broke barriers and made history on a number of fronts, making it one of the most transformative elections our nation has ever seen. One of the most groundbreaking changes was in the way Americans received and processed vital information about the most pressing issues—for the first time in American history, blogs, social networking sites, and other web-based media were the primary sources of information for many voters. They helped shape individual opinions and the public discourse at large.

While the Internet has proven to be instrumental in disseminating intelligent, well-developed information on public policy, it has unfortunately also been a medium for disseminating hateful rhetoric and promoting the politics of fear. The progressive movement’s challenge moving forward is to not only help curtail the spread of this inaccurate information, but also seize this new media’s benefits to help promote a factual, intelligent, and broad progressive policy agenda.