Last Wednesday, Mike Zapler, a reporter with the San Jose Mercury News in their Sacramento Bureau came down to Orange County to spend a day with me, which was fun. He’s a cool guy, and he wrote a pretty lengthy profile on the website and its influence, that actually appears in today’s Contra Costa Times. It will run in the Mercury News soon, I’m sure, since that is Zapler’s "home paper" — but the Mercury News, the Times and about fifty other papers are all under the umbrulla of Media News Corporation.
I would like to give a shout-out to United States Congressman John Campbell, who came over and shared an iced tea with us on Wednesday. Somehow he ended up on the cutting-room floor of this piece, though the Congressman did a great job of talking about the important role that our website plays "Inside the Beltway" and on what happens out that way.
I’d also like to thank Senator Dick Ackerman and Dan Schnur for their kind words. I’ll definitely give a shout-out to our vital FR advertisers, without whom this site would not be a reality. And last, but most significantly, thanks go to YOU, the FR reader. We appreciate your daily visits to this website!
This is also an opportunity, in my defense to say that while it was true that I had by Tiger Woods Golf up on the Xbox when Zapler arrived, somehow this article makes it look like a much bigger part of my life! Nice.
Anyways, the article begins below, and you can either link out to the CC Times website to read the rest (registration required) or I also have a .pdf of the article linked, which requires no registration.
Media News Sacramanto Bureau
By Mike Zapler
(Appears in today’s Contra Costa Times)
IRVINE — There’s plenty of hand wringing in the press about why the state still doesn’t have a budget six weeks into the fiscal year. But one member of the media is delighting in the standoff and playing an oversized role in keeping it going: a 39-year-old conservative blogger who spends hours of his workday in bed typing away on an aging Dell laptop, hundreds of miles from the Capitol.
Jon Fleischman has never aspired to be a reporter. "Fair and balanced" is decidedly not his thing.
"I don’t pretend to be objective," the longtime GOP activist said last week in his modest tract home in Orange County, aka blog headquarters. "I operate under the premise that conservatives are right and liberals are wrong."
It is precisely that attitude that has made his nearly 2-year-old Web site, Flash Report, a powerful bully pulpit during the six-week budget impasse. Fleischman has used the blog to buck up the 14 Senate Republicans who are holding firm against the budget despite intense pressure to vote for it from their own GOP governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, not to mention countless newspaper editorial boards and interest groups urging them to do their job.
"Once the budget is approved, you will all be relegated back to a very peripheral role as the Governor then re-engages with legislative Democrats on healthcare issues, and his international anti ‘global warming’ jihad," Fleischman wrote in one typical post to the minority senators, who have unique clout over the budget because it requires a two-thirds vote. "So do the right thing."
The Republican senators, in turn, have used the blog as their forum-of-choice to make the case for deeper spending cuts, fewer restrictions on development and other causes they’ve cited in not voting for the budget approved by the Assembly. As of late last week, 12 of the 14 GOP holdouts had written for Flash Report, http://www.flashreport.org , during the budget debate — missives that draw instant praise from like-minded readers.
Flash Report’s role in the budget debate, some observers say, offers a striking example of how blogs are changing the political media landscape. Traditionally, politicians issue a news release or hold a news conference and hope the evening newscast or local newspaper uses a snippet… (continued)
You can read the rest of the story online at the Contra Costa Times website here.
We have created a .pdf of the story here, if you prefer.
(FYI – Since I get this question a lot, MSM stands for Main Stream Media.)
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