Matt Compton says so very much, in his post “Jena and the Internet”:

When the Jena 6 does make an appearance on progressive blogs today, it’s little more than a passing nod. Huffington Post has a blog post buried below the fold; ThinkProgress gives it a two-sentence news brief.Now, in the wake of the protests, the bloggers are a bit more talkative about Jena, and Ezra Klein is one of those who commented on the late-developing coverage, saying: “[The silence] is telling as to the tenuous relationship between the online left and what’s more traditionally been the left.”

But outside the major blogs, the Internet hasn’t been silent on this issue. On Facebook, there are more than 500 groups, with thousands of members, which reference Jena. On YouTube, there are more than 1,600 videos that mention the town, including this one — which has been seen more than 1 million times. A Google Blog Search today yielded nearly 40,000 results. The Wikipedia entry is 2 months old, 3,000 words long, and contains 39 footnotes. In the progressive Christian community, the blogs are all over this. Obviously, Jena has been a lead topic on the African-American blogosphere (on sites that cover everything from politics to hip-hop) for months.

So why did the big progressive sites take so long to focus on Jena? Ezra’s take that this was an “issue of the traditional left” is off-target. The big-name civil rights figures had to scramble to catch up with Jena. There wasn’t a central planning committee directing yesterday’s protests — the organization came together from the bottom up. The protests in Jena were the result of conversation and debate on the social networks, in blogs, over message boards, through email, and on African-American radio shows. It looked like a true, decentralized, “people-powered” movement.

The big progressive blogs missed the story initially for a variety of reasons, including their and their readership’s demographics, but also because of their focus on developments in Washington and in electoral politics. As the Jena story reached a critical point last week, most blogs were overwhelmingly focused on the Kabuki theater of the Senate debate on Iraq and MoveOn.

Ten thousand people marching on Jena is pretty substantive proof that the online left is bigger and more diverse than readers of Daily Kos. In fact, it extends beyond blogs altogether, as illustrated by the role of social networks in creating and channeling energy towards the Jena protests. The Rev. Al Sharpton said that the protests marked the start of a 21st century civil rights movement. Jena might also mark the start of a new phase in online progressive politics as well.

VERY interesting that 1) most of the nationwide organizing around the Jena 6 was done online and was done through bottom-up organizing (instead of top-down). And 2) most of the major (shall i say mainstream?) progressive blogs did not cover the issue like the mass mobilization movement it was.

There’s a similar post about this issue on DailyKos, and the comments to that post are VERY telling. Seems like people of color and whites see issues quite differently.

On another but similar note, BFP wrote a post entitled “The ‘Nobody’ posting about the Jersey political prisoners” and goes on to share a number of blogs that have written about the queer women of color in Newark, NJ who were targeted for hate crimes when they were actually ATTACKED as part of a hate crime (similarities to the Jena 6). Looks like it’s mostly people of color who have blogged about it, mobilized around it. Apparently it must have been stated somewhere that nobody was writing about this issue. BFP responds with:

The erasure of work through the creation of “nobody” discourse = the continued marginalization of the worker.
Or: It’s funny how “nobody” is always so damn colored.

Reminds me also of the question that arises every few months, predictably, in the progressive blogosphere — “Where are the women of color bloggers?” and “Where are the people of color bloggers?”