Category: Media

Unless you’re sharing your meals with Osama in a Pakistani cave, you’ve read Matt Welch’s deal on blogs for CJR. My favorite part:

Are bloggers journalists? Will they soon replace newspapers?

The best answer to those two questions is: those are two really dumb questions; enough hot air has been expended in their name already.

A more productive, tangible line of inquiry is: Is journalism being produced by blogs, is it interesting, and how should journalists react to it? The answers, by my lights, are “yes,” “yes,” and “in many ways.”

The concluding graf is good too, but I don’t want to spoil your cave-dwelling fun.

I give Matt an “A” on this excellent composition.

The least surprising development in blog-trashing is Blah Blah Blog, a snarky piece of push-back from Maureen “Aren’t I Cute” Dowd:

In a lame attempt to be hip, pols are posting soggy, foggy, bloggy musings on the Internet. Inspired by Howard Dean’s success in fund-raising and mobilizing on the Web, candidates are crowding into the blogosphere — spewing out canned meanderings in a genre invented by unstructured exhibitionists.

Inspired by the people who coined the term “Dowdify” for the practice of distorting quotations by dishonest elision, political blogs hold the establishment’s feet to the fire, and you can ask Trent Lott and Howell Raines how that works. And as far as I know, I invented the political blog in 1995 for the Coalition of Parent Support, a California grass-roots political organization. If the mighty MoDo doesn’t like this invention of mine, she should probably stop using the other things I invented or co-invented, such as UTP Ethernet and Wi-Fi. It simply wouldn’t be right for her to sully her alpha-girl cuteness with such vulgarity.

A fellow named Chris Lydon has been interviewing bloggers and posting mp3s of the interviews to a web site. The people he’s interviewed seem to think he’s a great interviewer, and I can’t see why. In the course of interviewing Reynolds, who he calls “the Warblogger” as if there’s only one, he asserts that the New York Times supported the war in Iraq, and offers as proof the columns of Tom Friedman and Bill Safire. This was so idiotic it made my head nearly explode, and Reynolds questioned it but was polite and let him get away with it. When Reynolds pointed out that the anti- side in the Iraq war debate wasn’t really about the war, but about such things as America’s place in the world (really was more about Bush’s legitimacy as president, to tell the truth) Lydon didn’t see any problem with that, and the fellow was all agush with the “democratic” nature of the blogosphere.

While everybody likes a good ass-kissing from time to time, it’s always seemed to me that it’s much less satisfying when done by a moron. Is that too harsh?

The movie Legally Blonde was written by a Stanford law student who didn’t enjoy her time there:

I was in my first week of law school, in 1993, and I saw this flyer for “The Women of Stanford Law,” so I was like, “I’ll go and meet some nice girls. Whatever.”

I went to the meeting, and these were not women. These were really angry people. The woman who was leading it spent three years at Stanford trying to change the name “semester” to “ovester.” I started laughing and I realized everyone in the room took it very seriously. So I didn’t make any friends there.

Sounds like the Stanford that’s produced so many of the winners I’ve worked with in the Valley of Despair.

Number 2 Pencil is alive and well and off blogspot.

Dean Esmay’s good works are sure to win him in place in Archive Heaven.

A Dog’s Life is now on MT and master of his own domain.

Matt Welch won a bunch of ribbons and trophies for his writing at an LA Press Club shindig recently, but they only gave him a red for The Politics of Dead Children. I demand a recount.

Lots of people are just now discovering that Bill O’Reilly is a thin-skinned and pompous blowhard. This isn’t news, people, but I commend all who’ve managed to live their lives oblivious to this nasty little man for so long that they’re just now finding it out. His show is less well-researched than the average cat blog, as far as that goes.

Dr. Frank’s Blogs of War has moved.

Don’t tell the battling Moxies about this site.