Dubya Digs the Blogoshpere

At Bush's town hall meeting today in Wheeling, West Virginia, he was asked by a woman whose husband had just returned from Tikrit how she might go about getting "several DVDs of footage of wonderful things" going on in Iraq that her husband had compiled into mainstream distribution.  She was vocally frustrated by the slanted, negative coverage she's been seeing in the mainstream media.

The President was quite keen on using new technologies, especially the internet, and explicitly blogs, to get the unfiltered message out.

Working on a transcript and/or video of the relevant portion of the event...

Update:  Video is available at Expose the Left.  Transcript is also available in the extended entry.

WOMAN: This is my husband who has returned from a 13 month tour in Tikrit.

BUSH: Oh yeah, thank you buddy. Welcome back!

WOMAN: His job while serving was as a broadcast journalist and he has brought back several DVDs full of wonderful footage of reconstruction, of medical things going on, and I ask you this from the bottom of my heart for the solution to this. Because it seems that our major media networks don’t want to portray the good, they just want to focus –

[tremendous applause from audience]
——on another car bomb or they just want to focus on the more bloodshed, or they just want to focus on how they don’t agree with or what you’re doing when they don’t even probably know how you’re doing what you’re doing anyway. But what can we do to get that footage on CNN, on FOX, to get it on Headline News, to get it on the local news because you can send it to the news people, and I’m sorry I’m rambling on like I have –

BUSH: So was I though, for like an hour –

[laughter]

WOMAN:——can use this and it’ll just end up in a drawer because it’s good and it portrays the good and if people could see that, if the America people could see it, there would never be another negative word about this conflict.

BUSH: Well I appreciate that. No it’s –

[applause]

BUSH: Before I come out and speak, I’ve spoken in Cleveland, gave press conference yesterday. Spoke in Cleveland Monday, press conference yesterday, here today. I’m going to continue doing what I’m doing to try make sure people can here there’s – why I make decisions and as best as I can explain why I am optimistic we can succeed. One of the things that we have to value is that that we do have a media, free media that’s able to do what they want to do and I – you ask me to say something in front of all the camera here [laughter]. Help over there will ya? I just got to keep talking and word of mouth, there’s blogs, there’s internet, there’s all kinds of way to communicate which is literally changing the way people get their information and so if you’re concerned I would suggest that you reach out to some of the groups that are supporting the troops, that got internet sites and just keep the word moving.