‘This phenomenon is not going away’

December 22, 2006

The mainstream media’s hostility for blogs is hardly new, but it’s been particularly intense lately.

On Wednesday, Wall Street Journal editor Joseph Rago told readers, “(P)osts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion.” Rago went on to describe political blogs as “predictable,” “excruciatingly boring,” and promoting “intellectual disingenuousness.” A day later, George Will was equally unkind.

Given this, I thought it’d be worth noting that the Chicago Sun-Times’ Rich Miller came to the medium’s defense today.

This phenomenon is not going away, no matter how much it is dismissed or chastised. The Internet has been seized on as a democratizing tool by millions of perpetually democracy-hungry Americans. Bloggers should definitely be open to criticism by the mainstream media. That’s America. But lumping everyone together with the crackpots is neither fair nor honest. And the fact that so many reporters and pundits can’t seem to get the story right just proves the bloggers’ point that too many of them don’t know what they’re talking about on everything else.

I don’t have anything to add; I just liked seeing this in print.

Pundit to Blogger = “Eschew.”

Blogger to Pundit = “Gesundheit.”

  • Thank you Mr. Rago, for proving once again that “writers write what they know from experience”:

    “(P)osts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion.”

    Is it just me, or does this sound like a perfect description of the WSJ Editorial Page?????

    Maybe it’s just coincidental, no????

  • Rago went on to describe political blogs as “predictable,” “excruciatingly boring,” and promoting “intellectual disingenuousness.”

    Nah, he’s definitely talking about the page he edits.

  • Is it just me, or does this sound like a perfect description of the WSJ Editorial Page?????
    Maybe it’s just coincidental, no????
    Comment by Tom Cleaver

    Now that’s irony.

  • first they ignore you
    then they laugh at you
    then they fight you
    then you win

    only one more step to go, it seems.

  • The loudest and most vicious anti-blog vitriol will of course come from established print pundits. Blogs are their competition, and offered for free. Blogs won’t likely replace front page style reporting (although some, like TPM, may provide supplementary material). But for nonreporting gasbags like Will, blogs are a direct threat to his meal ticket.

  • And the fact that so many reporters and pundits can’t seem to get the story right just proves the bloggers’ point that too many of them don’t know what they’re talking about on everything else.

    Exactly right.

    and Curmudgeon, thank you for the laugh!

  • While I have a better than average command of the English language I was stumped by the word logorrheic and had to look it up and found the following definition:

    excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness

    By this definition didn’t Rago render his statement wordy, excessive, and somewhat incoherent?

  • Considering that the Wall Street Journal and George Will do not countenance any opinion except from the right, my best hunch is they took a look at Red State, Little Green Footballs and Michelle Malkin. No wonder they hate blogging so much. I would too if that was my introduction to the medium.

  • George F. Will looks in the mirror every morning, sees a man who parts his hair on the left, and images he understands the definition of liberalism.

    It is so pointless to read or listen to him opine on any subject except how Republican’ts can be conservative (a task they have failed at for over twelve years).

  • On a rather dark, somewhat frigid, and very calm evening in 1912, a very large boat made predominantly of iron managed to cross paths with a very large piece of ice. Although billed by the mainstreasm media of that time as being “unsinkable,” the massive ship slipped beneath the surface of the cold, North Atlantic waters a little more than three-and-a-half hours after the initial event.

    The mainstream media of that era was wrong in its self-conceived illusion about Titanic’s invincibility—just as they are wrong in this day and age concerning “their” self-conceived invincibility as regards the blogosphere. To put it bluntly:

    MSM—meet your iceberg….

  • WSJ and George Will did not have a problem with talk radio. On the contrary they cheered on talk radio as a democratizing influence, taking on the elite media.

    The blogs have given the genuine liberals a chance to be heard. The Establishment does not like it.

  • I suspect Rago didn’t get a raise because the WSJ’s circ. numbers keep slipping. Of course the laughable hackery of the WSJ has nothing to do with circ rates. It must be them dang intertubes!

    But to Mr. Rago’s childish rant I would make the equally childish reply: What ya gonna do about it? Huh?

  • Sorry for being two days late, but it is that time of year.

    I just can’t imagine going this far through the comments and no one brought up the blogosphere’s response to George Will’s s-hit piece on incoming Sen. Webb’s encounter session with the belligerent Deciderer. And that it took 20+ comments on the other thread to get to it.

    How many pages and pages of comments did that column generate for Will at the WaPo? Almost all of them negative and pointing out his ham-fisted selective editing. No wonder Will’s got a chip on his shoulder, since he’s now got readers acting as the editors and clueing other readers in on his penchant for spanning the range from truthiness to blatant lies.

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