Andrea Batista Schlesinger

ECHO. Echo. echo. echo.

Props to our friends at Alternet, who have just launched Echo Chamber, a new blog that will "cover how progressive ideas and issues are communicated and gain traction in the overall media universe."

Lots of folks talk about the echo chamber, DMI among them, but Don Hazen defines it for us:

You may wonder: What is an "echo chamber"? It's a term that gets bandied about, usually along the lines of, "We progressives need a better echo chamber like the radical right has, what with Fox, Limbaugh, Drudge, etc."

With an effective echo chamber, a political idea or message, preferably one with clear values and goals, is repeated frequently in various media by multiple message carriers until it reaches a tipping point or helps achieve a political goal, or becomes part of the overall national political conversation.

For us here at DMI, we believe strongly in a focus on combining fresh ideas with effective messaging to facilitate a conversation that can influence public policy by first influencing the way people think about an issue.

Unfortunately, too many progressives talk the talk on building an echo chamber, but really are content to have a conversation among progressive elites. An echo chambre, if you will. They publish their thoughts on the Op-Ed pages of the Washington Post and The New York Times and hang out on the Sunday talk shows, taking a "trickle-down" approach to the efficacy of their work.

But shops like Alternet get it - they get that we can learn from what the reactionary Right did well without looking exactly like them while we do it. Our message is about how people really live, and so it is from there that our conversation should begin. So, as the DMIBlog has done for the last several months, Echo Chamber "will give voice not only to policy wonks and strategists, but also to the grassroots progressive activists who too often lack a forum in which to air their ideas and innovations."

As we like to say, you change the conversation first by changing who participates in it. Good luck, Echo Chamber.

Andrea Batista Schlesinger: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 10:08 AM, Jan 23, 2006 in Progressive Agenda
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