Blogs Become Sites for Soul-Searching on Life-and-Death Question

Popular as the uncensored bastions of ideological chest-thumping, Web logs have emerged in the debate over Terri Schiavo’s fate as something more mature: a place where people struggle to make sense of their complex and contradictory feelings.

Rantings and ravings still rule the day in the blogosphere, as it’s known, with plenty of political sniping. But the saga’s strong human element and moral undertones appear to be muting some of the shrillness and creating a virtual backyard fence for people to chat over.

“There’s this need for some kind of emotional attachment,” said Alex Halavais, an assistant professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who studies online media. “It really does fill in for what used to be water-cooler talk.”

The increased popularity of online diaries, combined with a rise of simple, free tools to create and to find them, has amplified grass-roots chatter for Americans trying to sort through their mixed feelings on the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube.

Mentions of “Terri Schiavo” on Web logs rose from fewer than 10 a day in December to more than 4,000 on Tuesday, according to Technorati, a search engine that tracks blogs. Another service, BlogPulse, found that online diaries made more mentions of Schiavo between Friday and Monday than they did of President Bush.

A survey in November by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 27% of Internet users, or about 32 million people, said they read blogs, up from 17% in February 2004. About 7%, or 8 million people, said they had created a blog.

“The blogosphere is a giant mass of confusion when it comes to Terri Schiavo,” wrote St. Petersburg, Fla., appellate attorney Matt Conigliaro in an e-mail. Conigliaro’s legal blog, AbstractAppeal.com, dissects the Schiavo case from a purportedly objective viewpoint.

ProLifeBlogs.com created a site that steers people to more than 300 blogs that supported its stance in favor of reinserting Schiavo’s feeding tube. Hundreds of bloggers backing that position have linked to BlogsforTerri.com, a site with news updates on the case and reader commentary.

Some Schiavo activists are even chronicling hunger strikes launched to parallel Schiavo’s experience.

On the other side, liberal bloggers laid into Republican lawmakers for inserting themselves into the case.

The Schiavo case hasn’t divided the country along traditional political lines. Recent polls have shown that a majority of people, regardless of their political affiliation, support the wishes of Terri Schiavo’s husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, to end her life, and bloggers have followed suit.

“Usually we have clear battle lines,” said Markos Moulitsas, of the left-leaning blog DailyKos.com. “On this issue we’re not seeing that happening.”

On C-Blog: Conservative Web Log, two Republican pundits laid out conflicting views.

“I won’t deny that this emerging power struggle among the branches of government is likely the worst possible forum for determining this issue,” wrote Travis McSherley, online editor for several conservative groups. “Yet matters of life and death -- namely preserving the former -- are at the fore of the state’s mission.”

Yet Dutch Martin, a State Department foreign service officer and columnist for TheRightReport.com, voiced his view that the case was a matter for Michael Schiavo to decide -- not her parents, Florida courts or local and federal politicians.

“Despite the hopes of her family and well-wishers, her condition is not going to improve,” he wrote. “Lord knows I would not want to be kept alive artificially if something like that (God forbid!) ever happened to me, and I’ve told my wife this more than once.”

The issue also drove Republican blogger John Cole to split from party politics on his blog, balloon-juice.com. He blasted the GOP’s “lunatic fringe” as being “divorced from reality” for turning the Schiavo case into a pro-life cause.

But lest he be mistaken for a Democrat, he rattled off the issues he still thinks that party has got wrong, including taxes and gun control. “Before I lose all my regular readers,” he wrote.