AT PAM’S HOUSE BLEND, a complaint about a lack of attention from “progressive” bloggers to the Jena 6.

Far be it from me to speak for the progressive blogosphere, but — as I was discussing with a colleague whose work on the “school-to-jail pipeline” has had him following the case closely — one big problem is that the facts have trickled out, and it was hard to get a clear narrative that made sense of what was going on. The signal-to-noise ratio wasn’t that good. Contrast this to the Cory Maye case, where Radley Balko made things quite clear early on. We’ve seen this in cases involving foreign bloggers in trouble, too, where people wonder why some get a lot more attention than others. Almost always it involves whether there’s a clear story online that someone can link to, and people who can get the story out to bloggers with an explanation of why it’s important. My Jena 6 email all seemed to be in media res, which is why I consulted Radley Balko. The email conveyed that people were upset, but that’s not enough — in the blogosphere, people are always upset!

UPDATE: Related thoughts from Orin Kerr.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Unconvinced.