{"id":9423,"date":"2006-12-22T14:45:00","date_gmt":"2006-12-22T19:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9423.html"},"modified":"2006-12-22T14:45:00","modified_gmt":"2006-12-22T19:45:00","slug":"this-phenomenon-is-not-going-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/this-phenomenon-is-not-going-away\/","title":{"rendered":"‘This phenomenon is not going away’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The mainstream media’s hostility for blogs is hardly new, but it’s been particularly intense lately.<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Wall Street Journal editor Joseph Rago<\/a> 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<\/a> was equally unkind.<\/p>\n

Given this, I thought it’d be worth noting that the Chicago Sun-Times’ Rich Miller came to the medium’s defense<\/a> today.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don’t have anything to add; I just liked seeing this in print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}