The way we write affects both style and substance. The loquacious formulations of late Henry James, for instance, owe in part to his arthritis, which made longhand impossible, and instead he dictated his writing to a secretary. In this aspect, journalism as practiced via blog appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form. Its closest analogue might be the (poorly kept) diary or commonplace book, or the note scrawled to oneself on the back of an envelope–though these things are not meant for public consumption. The reason for a blog’s being is: Here’s my opinion, right now.The right now is partially a function of technology, which makes instantaneity possible, and also a function of a culture that valorizes the up-to-the-minute above all else. But there is no inherent virtue to instantaneity. Traditional daily reporting–the news–already rushes ahead at a pretty good clip, breakneck even, and suffers for it. On the Internet all this is accelerated.
The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element–here’s my opinion–is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought–instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.
That’s Joe Rago, in this morning’s WSJ [1]… a company which has made a fairly decent living with an online presence. it looks rather suspiciously like Mr. Rago is feeling threatened. He proceeds to advise us that the phrase “Mainstream Media” is “a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.”
Tell me how he’s not being defensive. And unjustifiably so. Far from being unfair, it is the mainstream media itself which is turned its own name into a pejorative.
The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.
The fact remains that the scraps of which you mention help to bring down the Canadian government at one point, and for that matter the Clinton administration at another. Two examples…. Two separate occasions where the mainstream media didn’t bother to open its yap apparently for reasons of it’s own. The blogs stepped into that space, and not only did the MSMS’s job for them, they had the public asking why this needed to be done… why the MSM wasn’t doing their job. I guess I can understand why you forgot that. And why you’re so defensive.
Appendum: (DavidL) Ok, I agree with Mr. Rago. All bloggers are not as important as some bloggers think they are. Then journalism is a process and not a profession. The bloggers at Powerline [2] are all lawyers by profession and damn good journalists to boot. A whore is paid for her services but not for any level of expertise. Then at least a whore is real person as opposed the fictious person, Jamil Hussien to whom the Associated Press attributed over sixty stories [3]. Absolutely the best reporting on the faux rape in Durham, North Carolina has been provided by K.C. Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, at Durham in Wonderland [4].
There is some good reporting in both the MSM and in the blogosphere. The trick is to know how to find it, and how to avoid the lame stuff.