Political Blogs

Blogs representing politicians are an interesting entity. These are not actually blogs from the candidates (usually), but instead blogs about them- generally created and maintained by members of their staffs. This provides an interesting attempt at a balance between truthfulness, and positivity. These blogs want to have some sort of credibility, but of course, not say anything damaging.

I'm sure how much credence I would lend these blogs. The example that I studied was about Sam Brownback. As I stated above, this entires are not posted by Brownback himself, but by a member of his staff. It's still fairly early on in the campaigning, so there was not a tremendous amount of news that they were posting, but there there were still posts dated from almost every day (three from May 15th alone).

It seems that Brownback is essentially using the blog to its potential. Most of the entires are well written and informative. There's only so much stock somebody can put into just another arm of a politicians campaigning. When you look to a blog put out by a candidate, you're not going to get unbiased factual news. In Brownback's, some entires were attacking other politicians, and others were spent glossing over and explaining away his faults, while the last third were dedicated to touting his accomplishments.

This particular blog does its job in promoting Brownback. In the end, I doubt it would really influence anybody who doesn't already follow him. However, the blog is just a small part of a much larger, and impressive website, which may hold a bit more clout.