October 5th, 2007
State Dept. policy wonks blog personal!
The Washington Post’s Al Kamen is a bit underwhelmed with the State Department’s entre into the world of blogging, called Dipnote. That’s short for “diplomatic note” but it does bring up other images …
This is what we’ve all been waiting for! No more media filters and distortions. Unbiased news directly from the federal government, a news source long noted for truthful, unbiased reporting. The Clinton administration and most all its predecessors vowed to end-run the media, and they finally have the new electronic media to help them to do it.
The site doesn’t quite seem to have that sophisticated, professional blogging thing quite down.
“Another busy day in New York!” Kristen Silverberg gushed from the UN Tuesday. (”I’m exhausted!” she wrote in a later dispatch that day.) “First thing this morning, President Bush met with President Karzai” to discuss progress in Afghanistan.
“We have a lot of hope,” she wrote, “for the future of Afghanistan,” where child mortality has declined 20 percent in the past five years and 80 percent of the public has access to basic health care and “primary school enrollment for both boys and girls has increased by five hundred percent over the past five years.”
And there’s the inside scoop from public diplomacy czarina Karen Hughes:
“This morning I spoke live with hundreds of thousands of people in the Arab world by appearing on Al Arabiya,” she wrote, “one of the leading television networks in the Middle East. Whenever I visit a country, and I’ve been to about 40 during the last two years, I usually do television and radio interviews (I’ve even appeared on what was described as the Indonesian version of ‘Oprah’).”
