HW 19: Blogs Creating Awareness For Genocide in Sudan

In the novel Blog! by David Kline and Dan Burstein, weblogs are not just talking about everyday American topics anymore but blogs are now taking on more serious issues that directly effect a group of innocent people that are dying everyday in another country. In the African country of Sudan, massive genocide has been going on and there has been minimal response from powerful countries like the United States to aid in this crisis. Some blogs, however, are desperately trying to gain attentiveness to this situation that has been ignored for long enough. People like the executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, and Samantha Power, author and Pulitzer Prize-winner of "A Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, FOR INSTANCE, DEMONSTRATE that "some bloggers purposefully harness the medium (of blogging) to promote wider awareness of their causes" and experts like Roth and Power are "devoted to collecting news and information about genocide in Sudan" (Kline and Burstein 91). IN OTHER WORDS, there are those individuals out there that are fighting to get information to as many people as they can but most importantly, they want to get the media's attention. CONSIDER the explosive effect that the media can have when it believes that it has a headlining issue that will grab everyone's attention like a government official’s negative comments, FOR EXAMPLE. Blogger Ethan Zuckerman expresses the significance of the media exploiting a story, "blogs let us tell offline media what we want. When blog readers made it clear we wanted to know more about Trent Lott's racist comments, mainstream media dug deeper into the story,...what sort of effort would it take to choose an important issue-say the Sudanese government's involvement in Darfur?" (Kline and Burstein 92). IN SUM, THEN, it is clear that the media has a powerful impact when it comes to getting the facts out to the world and that the media listens to the bloggers to see what is important to them. I guess the real question here is, how much longer will it take or how many more lives have to be lost before the mainstream media pays attention to this genocide?