March 09, 2006
BLOGGER SPOTLIGHT: Atlas Blogged
Today the Blogometer talks to conservative Pamela, author of Atlas Shrugs.
What is your full name?
Pamela aka Atlas
What is your age?
Uh... you're kidding right?
Where did you grow up?
South Shore -- Long Island, heh.
Where do you live now?
New York City and Long Island.
What is your occupation? Have you ever worked on a political campaign or for the mainstream media?
I am the former publisher of The New York Observer, I left that working world for the altogether different working world of shaping the future, raising, rearing my girls to be citizens of the world and to make a difference, tough when our culture deifies Lil Kim. I am a stay at home ma. And no, I have never worked in any political campaign or in any political capacity.
When did you start blogging and why?
The short answer, it's the end of the world as we know it. And the complacency and diversionary media's antics post 9/11 border on sedition. I finally started blogging a year ago out of sheer frustration with the lack of veracity -- intellectual honesty -- in the media at this most grave moment is history. The dearth-of-objective-news vacuum was huge and the Blogosphere came to my intellectual rescue and IMHO the rescue of the free world. Posting to Little Green Footballs just wasn't enough. I wanted to do something, Effect change.
What has been your favorite post, or favorite story to write about, in that time?
I wrote an op-ed piece as a rebut to a ridiculous, mendacious article on the presidential election in a small local newspaper and reposted it on Little Green Footballs (to which I owe all my blogging efforts). I subsequently posted it retroactively on my blog. That post was the zygote, the first cell of the birth of my blog. "The Case for War" cut through the left wing propaganda and asked America what hard choices we would make and why.
The media and the all news cable channels continue to abdicate their role as responsible disseminators of information, they avoid the most serious issues of the day, sedating a willing American public into this false sense of security. Their opinion (generally leftist) has replaced the news. There are a great many people in America that have been reeducated to believe that 9/11 was a couple of guys that got lucky. This, in spite of the wild rhetoric, daily terror and acts of war perpetuated by Radical Islam across the world. If anything Bush is a victim of his own success, protecting us as well as he has. And the "FISA" nonsense is the left's attempt to disable Bush's ability to continue to do that and to take him down as well.
Describe your typical blogging schedule. And what is your average output?
My blogging schedule is nuts and has taken over my life... any free moment for the blog, I blog. Get up, get outta bed, drag a comb across the kid's head. Head 'em up, move 'em out... hit the newspapers and best news sites, check the emails, start writing. Attend to personal biz... hit the blog, the emails, the news, the tips, everyday is different. I chose my social outings carefully, mostly War on Radical Islam will get my attention. Sometimes I find I have been blogging all night, it's 6 am and so I nod out for a half hour then do the kid thang.
I am so impassioned by it because we are working against a clock, a scary clock. And we have got to get the word to as many people s possible as fast as we can. The world is at war, pretending it to be anything else will be fatal.
Who is your favorite political blogger? Favorite non-political blogger?
Little Green Footballs. Hands down. When the history books are written, Charles Johnson will surely go down as a great American that made a critical difference between victory and defeat. His role has been largely ignored but so what? Most of the greats are ignored in their time. Van Gogh was ignored in his time too, although I don't think Charles can draw... but you get my meaning. The media wants Charles and the blogs for that matter to just go away. But just the opposite is happening, the blogs are dictating the national dialog. What's on the blogs today, is in the news 3,4 sometimes a week later.
Look, I ran those Mohammed cartoons u back in October. I cut the one with the turban out of The New York Post and scanned it and ran it back then but the MSM ignored it until it was rammed down their throat.
Nonpolitical blogs? You mean there is such a thing? I haven't a clue.
Who is your favorite mainstream media columnist?
Thomas Sowell
What is your favorite television news program, either network or cable?
"The Beltway Boys," that Fred Barnes rocks, is such a stud.
What MSM-produced websites (i.e. newspapers, magazines) do you visit on a daily basis?
New York Sun -- best newspaper, hands down, WSJ's Taranto and Political Journal, my Yahoo newspage, Weekly Standard, YNET, Dr. Jack Wheeler's To The Point, Townhall, NRO's The Corner and honestly, I am so all over the map it changes but those are mainstays.
What non-MSM websites (i.e. blogs) do you visit on a daily basis?
Always Little Green Footballs, I check out Glenn, Roger, adore Wretchard's Belmont Club, Malkin (of course), Tom over at Bizzy Blog should have been Greenspan's replacement, CUANAS just started a brilliant little gem -- Infidels Bloggers Alliance, Jihad Watch, No Pasaran, Vital Perspectives, there are so many... check my blogroll.
How often, or do you ever, read a newspaper in its dead-tree (i.e. print) form?
I dig the Sun, I can not lie...
How do you see the new media and old media affecting and influencing each other in the next five years?
The MOST SIGNIFICANT shift in the news paradigm is the role that media plays. No longer sufficient in merely bringing us the News, the American public must now choose its disseminator, its sifter, filter, prism and demand thorough and complete journalism but one with a moral compass because a press is prejudicial when they are unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between terrorists and the victims of terror.
I am not one that believes that big media is dead. Much like in marketing when direct mail became the big thang and that it would kill print, or that television would kill cinema, the blogosphere is an "in addition to." A critical piece of the media puzzle, one that will finally make "an honest woman" of the MSM. The MSM can no longer go off half cocked. Back in 2000, whe)n the MSM dropped the DUI bomb on Bush just days before the election, it really hurt him.
In 2004 when the MSM dropped that AWOL bomb on Bush, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs was there to counter with the truth and it absolutely changed the course of the Presidency, and history. So the blogs are necessary. Most necessary and the blogosphere will grow exponetially and replicate the media landscape of Lincoln, crowded , loud, opinionated, electric and diverse. Yes, wildly diverse. We will all co-exist, feed off each other. The difference will be where the American people choose to get their news. The cat is out of the bag. hOOha!
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