In a piece titled The Blog Mob and subtitled “Written by fools to be read by imbeciles,” Wall Street Journal assistant features editor Joseph Rago slags bloggers thus:
The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Though he lists a number of ways in which he thinks blogs appall, I get the feeling the nut of it is this:
People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses. And part of it, especially in politics, has to do with conservatives. In their frustration with the ancien régime, conservatives quite eagerly traded for an enlarged discourse. In the process they created a counterestablishment, one that has adopted the same reductive habits they used to complain about. The quarrel over one discrete set of standards did a lot to pull down the very idea of standards.
The counterestablishment aspect may irritate Rago most. We conservative peasants who took up torch and pitchfork just finished helping kick RINO butt. We’re not done yet; serve up another bunch of progressivist Republicans in 2008 and many of us will do what we can to send them packing too.
It’s a big blogosphere, but Mr. Rago doesn’t distinguish according to blogging platform or point to a blog that upholds standards others might strive for. This can’t be carelessness, because Rago pointedly rejects opinion-mongering. It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume he faults not only independents but also (for instance) the blogs by David Frum, Mark Levin and others at NRO.
Why might he do so? Well, the NRO gang is guilty of the “Instant response,” that “with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor.”
Rapidity also impairs, and a ready-to-hand blog does not necessitate, checking with one’s betters across a network of controlling relationships. Perhaps Mr. Rago regrets the indiscipline, the absent sense of obligation to the Right’s establishment and the choices it feels entitled to make on our behalf.
Submit to Stumbled Upon!
Remember, with the exception of the WSJ editorial page staff, the journalists of the Journal come from the same backgrounds, prejudices, and lock-step ignorance that the rest of the MSM does. This could have come from the newsroom of the NYT, the LAT, or the Boston Globe, just as easily as from the features page of the WSJ. Oddly enough, the paper that probably does digital better than anybody else, WAPO, hasn’t regurgitated much of this sort of banal anti-blogosphere boilerplate.
Even if this piece is a deliberate hatchet job (and I think it is) against a communication medium that is marginalizing his medium, insulting readers you would like to coax back by calling them imbeciles isn’t a persuasive writing style I ever learned in any writing class. Which School of Journalism did Mr. Rago attend? He should sue.
I guess some of them are. Goodness knows I’d put Glenn Greenwald in that category. Certainly not all, though - the best of the bloggers have more intellectual firepower than virtually all media personalities, and a much broader range of experience to draw on to boot.
Besides, even if it were true, it would be the pot calling the kettle black. Most of the MSM is “Written by pompous fools to be read by pretentious imbeciles”. The level of condescension in the mainstream media is sickening. A condescending blog usually doesn’t attract a lot of readers. And the pretentious fools tucking their New York Times under their arm as a talisman against reality are merely fooling themselves.
And this “have to think about it overnight to have rigor” idea only applies to new concepts. I don’t need to think overnight about, say, Jimmy Carter’s latest idiocy. He’s always been an idiot, and he will always be the highest ranking useful idiot in American History.
Billy, are you saying that Carter is the highest ranking useful idiot in American history?
Heh. It’s now got the six top spots on Google, including the Daily Pundit posts occupying the two top spots. Daily Pundit - One of the Longest Tails In the Blogosphere. Hey, that wouldn’t make a bad addition to the logo!
And why am I talking about trivia like Google-bombing Carter in the comments beneath a terribly important WSJ screed?
Because it’s not terribly important, that’s why.
Heh. I am most definitely saying that, and so far the only people who have disagreed are those who are unfamilar with the term “useful idiot”.
On Live.com, Carter’s own presidential web site comes in at #5 on the search. It’s been as high as #1. If the custom ever spreads beyond me, I’m hoping to see his site hit #1 on google too.
Yes, it’s trivial. Sometimes it’s the little pleasures that count…
When the Egyptian priest/scribes who had spent thrity years learning hyroglyphs encountered linear a — a pre-greek alphabet of simple symbols — the decried it is ugly, ignoble, and worthy only of savages.
Iamgine how someone who has spent years climbing the greasy pole of journalism and can hope only for a few column inches a week must hate the blogs, which require only a laptop and a dsl connection.
But the scribes vanished, and the Iliad was not written in hyroglyphs. Nor did anything so written ever make its way into the literary canon.
Ta-ta, MSM. Darwin has left you a voice mail.
By the way, this sort of outraged eruption from the priestoids of the Church of Journalism doesn’t bother me all that much. After all, I pretty much call them, on a daily basis, a pack of talentless careerist hacks bent on peddling agenda-driven propaganda and calling it news, so I can’t see any reason why these chimps shouldn’t try to get in an occasional lick. I just wish they were a little better at it. Dealing with these sort of attacks is too much like kicking Jimmy Carter around.
This is what I have been saying about the MSM for some time now.
Very good nemo, I like the comment.
Folks are on a roll today. Nemo and Bill both hit triples.
The one founded by Dale Carnegie’s evil twin.
Carter is the highest ranking useful idiot in American history?
Indeed.
Heh.