No Respect?

BLOG’S BOOT FROM LEGISLATIVE TV SHOW JUST THE BEGINNING OF THE ONLINE CRAZINESS

FITSNews – May 4, 2007 - A South Carolina political blog was booted from a State Senate TV program yesterday because it wasn’t a member of the “credentialed press.” The irony? The television program in question was devoted to discussing “how blogs impact the legislative process.”

The blog, A Daily Shot, was denied access to the set of “This Week In The Senate,” a half hour news segment televised by SCETV and moderated by Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell.

McConnell later apologized for the incident, saying it was the S.C. Press Association which booted the blog, but the real fireworks between political bloggers and elected officials in the Palmetto State could just be beginning.

One of the panelists on McConnell’s show, State Sen. Jakie Knotts, hinted later in the program that some South Carolina political blogs may soon face legal action for their content.

“I’m not too sure that some of these blog owners aren’t going to start seeing some lawsuits in the very near future about slanderous material that appears on their blog,” Knotts said on the program.

Later in the show, Knotts got even more specific, saying “some serious decisions are going to have to be made by the court on the owners of these blogs that put stuff on there that is so outrageous and slanderous.”

“There’s going to be a test case I can tell you that,” Knotts said.

Even though FITSNews didn’t attend (or attempt to attend) the legislative television program, our little website was quite the topic of conversation.

“They’re these political blogs, I guess you call them, one of them that comes to mind is called FITSNews.com,” McConnell said. “Seems to stir a lot of chit chat around the State House.”

McConnell specifically referenced our post on the current legislative controversy surrounding the selection of Supreme Court Justices.

“On a blog this morning there is a story about Supreme Court races,” McConnell said. “And if this blog were correct, behind the scenes everything’s already being settled. Now is that blog going to create a bunch of news stories, and then debate about whether the system we’ve got is broken or not? Can a blog do that?”

Well, we do tend to get things right a lot.

For example, we reported nine weeks ago that S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford was going to name Greenville developer Bo Aughtry as his third nominee to head the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control Board (seeing as his first two nominees didn’t work out so well).

Sanford’s office – which unlike most legislators refuses to go on the record with blogs – denied the report in The State newspaper the following day, but lo and behold in today’s paper his office formally named Aughtry as the governor’s nominee.

Bottom line? We’re pretty much omniscient around here. In fact, there’s a rumor going around that God is considering adding FITSNews to the Bible (right after Revelations).

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