Ted Johnson, Maegan Carberry, Teresa Valdez Klein: Is Gov’t 2.0 Having A Tea-Bagging, Twittered Moment?

By HuffingtonPost.com published on Wednesday, April 15, 2009 and is filed under Obama Watch. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.

It’s Tea-Bagging-Tea-Party-Glenn-Beck’s-Birthday-Day! Everyone’s going wild about getting tea-bagged today, with parties taking place in major cities all across the country to protest Obama raising taxes and bailing out Wall Street. But what’s interesting to us is how all this is being organized. Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have turned into a huge organizing tool for this group, with #teaparty trending to the top of Twitter’s search. So here’s the big question: how should new technologies, like Twitter and Facebook, be used in campaigns, and how should they be used in government?

Adriel Hampton, a news commentator, new media pundit, and investigator with the San Francisco DA Office, is running for Congress in California’s 10th Congressional District and he joins our hosts Ted Johnson and Maegan Carberry to talk twitter and populism, how the mainstream media has mostly ignored the tea parties, and how government shouldn’t waste this activist energy, no matter which party it belongs to. What’s with Obama stopping his twitter feed just because he’s not in office? Doesn’t that show how the administration isn’t being engaged technologically? Can the Republicans really take this populist “revolt” and somehow organize it for the next election? We also get a friendly call from Steve, a fellow BlogTalkRadio, wondering why the media isn’t taking the tea-bag parties seriously?

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Wilshire & Washington, the weekly Blog Talk Radio program that explores the intersection of politics, entertainment, and new media, features co-hosts Ted Johnson, Managing Editor of Variety; conservative blogger Teresa Valdez Klein (www.teresacentric.com), and liberal blogger Maegan Carberry (www.maegancarberry.com). The show airs every Wednesday at 7:30am PST on BlogTalkRadio.com.