Joseph Rago, the assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal, has a column today about political blogging. It’s quite interesting in places, mainly for its showy vocabulary. Shit. No blogger wants to be accused of being ‘uselessly logorrheic’. And Rago is spot-on here:
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.
I do try to remain self-endearing. And I don’t produce much reportage. Rago’s right…I’m just like a remora fish!! Although, to be certain I will have to research the remora fish to see if they are adorable.
Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line. Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions–John Kerry always providing useful material–while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq.
What’s this? The WSJ editorial page is accusing right blogostan of focusing on second-order distractions like John Kerry? Okay. That’s a start. How about a few others, like: what people do in the privacy of their bedroom, the cultural consequences of wishing people ‘Happy Holidays’, and the fascist oppression that prevents compulsory prayer in schools?
Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.
I’d like to step in here and defend the media. They are always getting accused of a liberal bias. And if you read Free Republic or Little Green Footballs you’ll quickly discover that it is true. The mainstream media shows their bias by their reticence to use words like raghead, sand nigger, and camel jockey. Of course, they are also huge warmongering cheerleaders and, too often, mere stenographers for Karl Rove’s spin shop. But that is a matter of concern only to simpering San Francisco Pelosi-style radicals.
Leftward fatuities too are easily found: The fatuity matters more than the politics. If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad’s judgment of newspapering–“written by fools to be read by imbeciles”–they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.
I gotta hand it to Rago. I just never considered pluralizing fatuity. Oh wait!! I guess that is what I am doing every time I write!! I’m pluralizing fatuity right now. Damn it. But if this self-endearing curator is pluralizing fatuities, then you, dear reader, must be an imbecile for reading it. And, remember:
Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses.
Hold on a minute. These mediocre masses were just named Person of the Year by Time Magazine. And you know what? We’re one very excited mob. It’s fantastic to have that kind of validation for what we already believe. The thing is, Time Magazine isn’t a blog. It’s a mainstream weekly that is notorious for its ability to cater to the mediocre masses. Hell, now the sycophants are even pandering to us.
But, no mainstream media critique of blogs would be complete without the standard accusation that the howling blogging mediocre masses have destroyed the standards of traditional journalism. I hear this every time I talk to a reporter. And it never gets less annoying.
And part of it, especially in politics, has to do with conservatives. In their frustration with the ancien régime, conservatives quite eagerly traded for an enlarged discourse. In the process they created a counterestablishment, one that has adopted the same reductive habits they used to complain about. The quarrel over one discrete set of standards did a lot to pull down the very idea of standards.
Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.
Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.
I’m not sure what to make of this last paragraph. Rago wishes we were all dead. Or, at least, he wishes our internet providers would cancel our accounts. That is pretty clear. And it is sad, I agree. But I have a hard time making sense of his conclusion. If democracy doesn’t work without checks and balances, so to speak, then wouldn’t thousands of citizen fact checkers pouring over the reportage of a few privileged Beltway insiders be a good thing? Might it not provide some protection, some check, perhaps some balance?
And in the concluding sentence (where I assume the ‘we’ve’ refers to traditional journalists), I am unsure how they’ve acceded to the imperatives of the internet.
Once you get through all the hifalutin english and try to understand Rago’s point, it becomes clear that he thinks the blogosphere has actually contributed to the decay of print journalism. And it has emerged as a force without an adequate countervailing balance. Since he doesn’t explain the causality of this development, it is a little hard to critique. So, I’ll just go with my gut and my experience talking with journalists.
Their main complaint about the blogosphere is that we make their job harder, that we don’t appreciate how difficult it is to nurture sources and get good information. It used to be that you could have a question about a product and you could call up the company that manufactures it and get the CEO on the phone. Now you get their public relations department and they just issue you talking points and/or refer you to their legal department. The whole world has become one big exercise in bullshitting, and journalism has suffered as a result.
I don’t dispute that this is a problem. But, my response is that this makes blogs all the more important. If reporters cannot call every source they rely upon a bullshit artist, the blogosphere can. And we do. And the public is more informed for it.
I don’t mind being a remora fish, I just wish the belly I was riding on would act more like a shark and less like a lemming. And, one more thing. When Rago says that the media ‘made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas’, I think he has completely misdiagnosed the problem. When all your sources are bullshit artists, you need to be more adversarial, not less. And if this is difficult, and I know it is, that does not give you an excuse to act disinterested about the truthfulness of your reporting. If Donald Rumsfeld says the moon is made of roquefort cheese, you need to call him on his crap. If you don’t, then bloggers are going to call both you and Rumsfeld a liar. And it’s just too bad that that makes you uncomfortable.
