The Media Matters show on PBS is a typically smarmy piece of not-for-profit condescension that can take any story and make it boring by a pedantic presentation. Their segment on blogs tonight was preceded by a piece of self-congratulatory self delusion on the premise that Op-Ed pages have changed Administration policy on Iraq, and another one on sensational photographs that was too odd to watch. The coverage of blogging was simply bizarre; they profiled four east-coast bloggers, Megan, InstaReynolds, Anil, and young master Willis, and I do mean profiled: they shot the segment in a Blade Runner-on-acid style that made the people look like cyborgs conjured up in a back room at the CIA lab where the AIDS virus was invented and the black helicopters come for maintenance.
This was apparently intended to make blogging off-putting and surreal to the traditionalists who still get the news from the papers and the McNeil News Hour. Despite the hammy presentation, Megan came off nearly as bright and articulate as she is on her blog, Reynolds showed symptoms of literacy, and Anil came across much better than he does on his blog. Willis looked and sounded like a sedentary teenager with a broadband connection and a deadbolt on his bedroom door, but he smiled and was very pleasant.
I don’t have high expectations of anything on PBS, and this show met them. They did spell the URLs correctly, and for that we should all be grateful, and now a whole new generation of people who watch PBS at 11:00 PM know that it was bloggers, and not James Carville and Sid Blumenthal, who put the Trent Lott story in the news. That’s PBS for you.
PBS is like bran muffins…bland but filling and good for you. Like brain colon blow.
I have to agree with your quote on Jolliffe’s weblog. Ironically, I am a long-time fan of Alex Jones and had been listening to him on the NPR radio station previously. I didn’t know he’d switched to PBS TV. I understand he’s from a distinguished newspaper family. Maybe that explains the perspective. I don’t watch much TV and the set I have now is a 12-inch B+W. You know, it looked even weirder in B+W! So I thought it was either my TV or maybe I was having a bad day.
We’ve got an Avid, and we’re going to use it.
By “sensational photographs,” I guess you mean the pics of the guy getting torched. The panel discussion was kinda like a high school book discussion club. The tall thin blond WASP cutting down the nerdy, bespectacled, Midwestern wannabe smartie chick.
The NYC photog segment was interesting though. I wish I could blend into the crowd with his apparent ease.
I remember a phone interview with someone from Media Matters last October, the lady was looking for unusual blogs and I suppose the “Kolkata Libertarian” qualified. Nothing much came of it. I do remember one of the questions had to do with support for israel on my blog, and my rather politically incorrect response 🙂 Heh he..