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There will always be individuals who have the talent to write and engage in discourse who do not have the credentials that scholars typically have. This is not to suggest that they should not be allowed to have that opportunity to sit at the table or that the media should bend over backwards to allow them that opportunity. We have already seen what typically happens when the media does; take a look at what happened in the Edwards campaign. Edwards allowed his wife Elizabeth to hire some of the most vitriolic voices that the blogosphere had brought birth to, yet in the end, the bloggers did not have enough resolve to navigate through the waters of the political culture the way a seasoned mainstream media journalist would. These were bloggers who were not necessarily a part of the mainstream in the beginning, yet worked hard to get and earn the respect of their peers in the blogosphere, and were mainstream at the end of the day. Yet being mainstream online and being mainstream in the media, which is controlled by big businesses, are two different things.

Bloggers should be encouraged to acquire an education and learn the morals and ethics, responsibilities, tact and professionalism that media journalists are expected to have before they are ever hired. The issue, is that blogging itself has a low point of entry, and is entirely too accessible; once professionalism and maturity begins to enter the picture more often than not the majority of them are left behind and weeded and picked through. Another example of this is what happened with Obama's MySpace page; a blogger had registered a page and used it to posit his own theories and ideas about Obama's campaign, and it became an unofficial representation of Barack Obama. When Obama's camp took it back from this blogger, he wanted to digress to conversation about the fact that he was willing to offer compensation for what was ultimately unprotected intellectual property. This blogger hadn't taken any efforts to protect or register what he was saying, wasn't speaking about Obama from his own platform independent of Obama's likeness and aesthetic and wasn't as savvy with his dealings with Obama's people as he could have been. Some things haven't changed that much with the new media, but most bloggers haven't been told or shown this and the infatuation of the technology often gets in the way of old fashioned common sense.

That blogger isn't completely out of the loop, but he could have had a greater footing in traditional

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