Blogs defogged
by Gene Lyons
Many normal, red-blooded Americans who, like me,
tuned to the Democratic
National Convention between innings of TV baseball
games may have found
themselves mystified by references to "blogs"
or "blogging." Depending upon
which network you watched, the Democrats’ awarding
press credentials
allowing politically oriented bloggers to cover
the Boston convention alongside
board-certified professional pundits was either
a very trendy, cutting edge move
or yet another sign of the decline and fall of
practically everything. The term
"blog" is a contraction of "Web log," a running
electronic diary posted on the
Internet by egotistical lone dementoes
who, unlike us modest, self-effacing
newspaper columnists, often have no professional
training whatsoever.
ha ha
(Even if, like mine, that training consisted
mainly of being yelled at by
incredulous editors. "You didn’t call him? Whaddaya
mean you didn’t
call him? Are you crazy? ")
Writing in The New York Times, one Jennifer 8.
Lee, a reporter whose middle
name is an Arabic numeral, found a journalism
professor who deplored the practice.
" I think that bloggers have put the issue of
professionalism under attack,"
said Thomas McPhail, professor of media studies
at the University of
Missouri-St. Louis." They have no pretense to
objectivity.
They don’t cover both sides. "
It’s tempting to ask how closely McPhail has followed
the recent history of the
newspaper interviewing him. In recent years,
the Times has devoted more space
apologizing for its own huge blunders than celebrating
chic restaurants in SoHo.
But it’s not tempting enough to give him a call.
Let’s move along here. McPhail
also proposes that journalists be" professionally
credentialed, "a boon to J-school
profs, but a bane to the nation. Journalism is
a trade best learned by doing;
academically, it’s a discipline in search of
a subject matter. The "board-certified"
bit above was a joke. So is licensing pundits.
Things are bad enough already.
Anyhow, like my own crusades against breast implants
and the designated
hitter, McPhail’s idea is going nowhere.
Blogger" Atrios" responded tartly on his site,
atrios.blogspot.com, to
condescending reports in the "mainstream" media.
"[T] hey spend a lot of
time talking about how we don’t have ‘editors
?’ or ‘fact checkers ?’
and how you just can’t trust that stuff you read
in the Internet," he noted.
Then he pasted in CNN transcripts of Judy Woodruff
citing unconfirmed
nonsense from "The Drudge Report" about John
Kerry’s expensive haircuts
and Wolf Blitzer alluding to unspecified "weird
aspects" of former White
House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s
private life.
Chastised, Blitzer blamed Bush administration
officials who later backed
off, seemingly realizing that smearing Clarke
would do more harm than
good. Nevertheless, Atrios made his point: Being
scolded about journalistic
ethics by cable TV celebrities is like being
faulted for bad taste by Paris Hilton.
ha ha
During the Democratic convention, for example,
the blogger who got the most
TV face time was "Wonkette," a. k. a. Ana Marie
Cox, who happens to be
quite a looker. Her site, wonkette.com, specializes
in ribald Washington gossip
of no interest. A characteristic recent item
concerned ABC’s George Stephano-
poulos being spotted checking his e-mail in the
men’s room, along with raunchy
speculation about—well, never mind.
The real significance of politically oriented
weblogs, however, lies precisely in the
challenge they pose to spin-driven "mainstream"
media. If you only watched CNN,
for example, you might not know that the "journalist"
Teresa Heinz Kerry told to
"shove it" worked for Richard Mellon Scaife’s
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, a right-wing
propaganda sheet that has made grotesquely false
allegations against her and the
charitable foundation she supports. After spending
the 1990s "reporting" about Bill
Clinton’s murders, Scaife’s sleuths have begun
smearing the Kerrys.
Unlike the big leaguers, Atrios not only provided
proper context (the "who" for
budding professional journalists), but linked
to articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
that city’s real newspaper, detailing the absurdity
of the Scaife charges.
Because his site links to everybody of interest,
reading Atrios for a week would
be the single best way I know to get oriented
with Democratic-accented weblogs.
Now that Atrios has unmasked himself as Duncan
Black, a Philadelphia economist
with a Ph. D. from Brown University, the absurd
rumor that your humble, obedient
servant here was responsible for this invaluable
site can be put to rest. Other blogs
I’d be flattered to be associated with include
"The Daily Howler" (dailyhowler.com),
Bob Somerby’s brilliantly iconoclastic takedown
of journalistic folly; Joshua Micah
Marshall’s scholarly, but lively "Talking Points
Memo" (talkingpointsmemo.com);
Eric Alterman’s "Altercations" (altercation.msnbc.com);
and Kevin Drum, a. k. a.
"Calpundit," currently on-line at washingtonmonthly.
com. Would that I could also
recommend the incomparable mediawhoresonline.com,
the funniest, most fearless
weblog of all, but the mystery woman who began
it during the 2000 Florida
vote-counting fiasco that brought us the Bush
administration has put her site
(again, not mine) on hiatus. Maybe if we close
our eyes and wish like Tinkerbell,
she’ll bring it back online between now and November.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little
Rock author
and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
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