Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter gets all butthurt about bloggers and meanies on the internets.
But we’re finding this works better for keeping on top of daily flaps than for learning genuinely new information. Bloggers rarely pick up the phone or go interview the middle-level bureaucrats who know the good stuff. It’s a lot easier to chew over breaking stories and bash old media. Where do they get the information with which to bash? Often from, ahem, newspapers.
This is absolute fucking bullshit and that weenie Alter has to know it. I can’t tell you how many times in the past year I’ve seen something covered on either my local news broadcast (KTVU; I like to watch it as I get ready for work) or cable news, only to think “I read about this last week on HuffPo/Wonkette/Reason/insert any one of dozens of blogs I read here”. And they certainly didn’t get it from print news, which is almost always the last medium to cover a story noawadays.
But how to explain the venom of so many comment sections and e-mails? Like senior citizens suffering from dementia, Web users often fall prey to “disinhibition”—the lack of a filter for their most brutal thoughts. In the campaign, this takes the form of an umbrage explosion, where a day rarely passes without someone’s taking grave offense over something.
Oh, suck it the fuck up, you candyass. All this sounds like to me is that you’re worried you’ve devoted your life to an obsolete media, and you’re too fucking old and set in your ways to adapt. MSM mouthpieces still railing against the evils of blogging in 2008 are like buggy makers yelling about how this “automobile” thing is just a fad in 1910. Plus, you work for Newsweek, which journalistically speaking is barely a step above the slambook my girlfriends and I passed around homeroom in 7th grade. There, is that enough umbrage for ya?
Besides, anyone using vitriolic comments as an excuse to bash blogging as a whole comes off as a desperate moran. If I may steal an example from Fire Joe Morgan, it’s like randomly pulling a pulpy romance paperback off an airport store shelf and saying, “This book sucks! Fuck you and your entire medium, Tolstoy!!”
Let’s just look at a couple of recent shining examples of the superiority of print media to blogs, shall we?
I like how the reporter Alexandra Silver says, “Leave aside” the patriarchal elements, which is like writing an article about Watergate and saying, “Leave aside the burglary and corruption, and let’s talk about G. Gordon Liddy’s tie.” Of course, I suppose that’s standard in journalism now. “Leave aside the fact that Bush lied to get us into a war, and let’s talk about how he grins so charmingly at reporters.” -from Pandagon’s excellent piece
WaPo op-ed columnist Richard Cohen blames the bad economy on young men and women getting tattoos. No, really. Why don’t you just blame it on those darn kids who won’t stay off your lawn, Dick–excuse me, Richard?
