punditocracy

The strange contradiction of the mass media is that it combines true journalism - the nuts and bolts, reporters on the street, old school journalism trade - with talking heads up their own asses who write "opinion". Frankly the blogsphere obsoletes the latter. I am not one of those blog triumphalists who think the blogsphere can replace the former, but there certainly are good examples of blogs who make the attempt; on the right, Patterico comes to mind, whereas on the left, Josh Marshall's TPM. Both are examples of blogs that do honest and genuine reporting.

Which is why the punditocracy is so threatened. Michael Skube of the LA Times today tries to argue that the blogsphere is a ranting mob as usual. But note anything odd in his examples?

The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.

And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. "No man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, "ever wrote but for money." Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers — Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post — are insistent partisans in political debate.

Kevin Drum notes of the above,

of these four examples, the first three are all professional writers and the fourth is a venture-funded site with a paid staff. If you're going to extol "thorough fact-checking and verification" over the blogosphere's "potpourri of opinion," you really ought to fact-check your assertions first.

And what's more, Josh Marshall emailed Skube directly about being lumped in. Guess what?

Not long after I wrote I got a reply: "I didn't put your name into the piece and haven't spent any time on your site. So to that extent I'm happy to give you benefit of the doubt ..."

This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly does use me as an example -- along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn't seem to remember what he'd written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he'd never read.

To which I got this response: "I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples..."

So Skube writes an opinion piece in the LA Times about how bloggers are just a pack of partisan hounds who do no real journalism, and roam free unfettered by the bounds of editorial control. The same editorial review which inserted blogs Skube admits to never having read for "more examples" to support his thesis? The ironies abound.