Confusion over the MBA: Who are we? Who do we THINK we are?

There has been a great deal of confusion about the MBA and claims by some who have I met personally who claim never to have heard of me or the MBA. It's not for lack of trying. The MBA has over 1,000 members. At one time we did list our founding members and our board members on our web site but as got involved in some cases with some really nasty people who made threats against members unassociated with a case and as we did not have insurance for board members we changed our policy. The fact is that most media associations do not provide a public list of their members. Maybe some so but we felt it best not too. There are folks out there who publicly state they are members and so long as they are that's fine. Here are a few folks who other bloggers would know that are members: Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, John Amato of Crooks and Liars, James Joyner of Outside the Beltway, Jeralyn Merritt of Talk Left, LaShawn Barber, Jeff Jarvis, Oliver Willis, Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Liza Sabater.

Here are some public indications:

Newsweek-MBA Political Blog, The Ruckus

MBA-PBS Feed for All-American Presidential Forum

MBA-AP Feed for U.S. v. Lewis "Scooter" Libby

We have not processed any applications for membership since early 2007 and have never actively recruited members. The reason for this is that the MBA does not have any financial resources and so I fund the MBA out of my own pocket subsidized by my speaking fees and consulting fees. Most of what the MBA has done is done by volunteers including attorneys who volunteer their time especially Ron Coleman our General Counsel, Alex Yuriev at Zubr Communications and other folks who do things like help with the web site or help organize events. Because I am the most passionate about the MBA a lot of the work naturally falls to me. Quite a few folks have complained about the web site over the past few days. No argument there, we were in the middle of making a transition to a new Drupal site last fall when personal commitments required that the volunteer working on the site withdraw from the project leaving the site barely converted to the new platform. I have no idea how to work in Drupal and have been busy working on a lot of other stuff myself so the site was neglected. My view was that we would be replacing things anyway as we rolled out the various initiative described above so it was not worth fixing until we were ready to launch in September so I had until then to find another volunteer (note: we would welcome any help on the site including anyone with a good knowledge of Drupal). That ought to indicate to people how unexpected this recent attention has been. If life were perfect the AP would have gone after Drudge Retort in October but c'est la vie.