Category: Media

— Matt Welch has issued a call for blogger assistance with a worthwhile project:

A Call for Blogger Assistance: I am writing a book review of Noam Chomsky’s 9-11, and the lefty collection September 11 and the U.S. War: Behind the Curtain of Smoke. One of my sub-themes, especially as regards the latter collection (filled as it is with the work of Ted Rall, Marc Herold, Robert Fisk, Arundhati Roy and Barbara Kingsolver), is the extent to which many of these writings were debunked or challenged (on weblogs and elsewhere) before these books even went to press.

See what you can do.

— O’Reilly Network: Essential Blogging Public Review [May 24, 2002]

Please download the PDFs of the tech review draft of Essential Blogging and give it a read. Is it good? Did we forget to cover something? Did we talk about something that’s not really useful? Our goal isn’t to be definitive and show you everything that these tools are capable of, but instead to give the beginning blogger enough to be dangerous. Did I say dangerous? I meant productive.

O’Reilly’s blogging book is available for public review. It looks reasonably good at first impression: two full chapters on Movable Type.

— Virginia Postrel, the Dallas architecture critic who aspires to be the second coming of Ayn Rand, devotes her blog to slogging blogs today:

My challenge to bloggers who think the blogosphere is immensely influential is the same as it has been for months: Oh yeah? Then why isn’t anyone outside the blog world talking about Brink Lindsey’s book? Why hasn’t it been reviewed in the NYT Book Review? Why did The Washington Post kiss it off in one nasty paragraph? Why isn’t Brink on NPR all the time? Why haven’t Time and Newsweek quoted him? It hasn’t even been reviewed in National Review or The Weekly Standard. All these places have plenty of room for far less worthy authors. Check out the full list of reviews here. This is ridiculously scant treatment of a good and thoughtful book, the sort of serious work that public intellectuals are supposed to do.

And in the course of her march to the sea, she trashes Sullivan and Reynolds, and touts her blog hit counts, which aren’t at all impressive (lower than mine, for example.) So why does the poor dear have a burr in her blanket, trashing the blogs and announcing a summer hiatus while she writes her Very Important Book about Aesthetics?

Beats me, but it looks like she’s coming unglued. She’s always struck me as a snob, mainly because of her practice of separating links to “pro” journalists from “merely amateur” bloggers. In the Blogosphere, nobody knows you’re a celebrity, Virginia, we only care about the content of your content. And if yours sucks because you’re busily writing books, that doesn’t make you better than the dude whose blog sucks because he’s mediocre, trendoid and derivative. Write a blog with insight, clarity, effervescence, and wit, and the people will come; beat the same dead horse day after day, and they’ll check out.

The free market of ideas is a harsh mistress, isn’t she?

Editor’s note: As much as Postrel annoys me, I have to admit that she’ no more an elitist, or a dead-horse whipper, than Sullivan; her obsession with cloning and Sullivan’s with Krugman are of a piece. Maybe OCD blogging is a hazard for all Mac fanatics. But maybe not.

UPDATE: Eric Olsen writes a love-letter to Postrel.

— Andrew Sullivan takes Eric to the woodshed and gives him a mighty whooping today (In “The Frightening Reynolds”) for his various criticisms:

By the way, the tedious Eric Olsen has been whining that I’m not a blogging team player by responding to his every email (they come almost every other day and I got exhausted responding, especially when they keep having URGENT in the contents line). Memo to Eric: reprint any 1000 words you like from my blog for your warblog book. Good luck with the project. Now please stop spamming my email tray. But can I say a word about the notion of a “blogging community” to which we allegedly owe obligations, deference and respect? Phooey.

Worst of all, there’s no link to Eric’s blog. That makes Sully a BlogHole, one who witholds links. First rule of the Blogophere: you can trash anybody anytime, fairly or not, as long as you get the URL right. These pro journalists are so hard to housebreak.

— When I checked my site this morning, I discovered RoboPundit had added a dozen new stories automatically, just like it’s supposed to. I like it when this stuff actually works. The top stories in the WarbloggerSphere this morning are cleary the Instapundit redesign and rehost, and the ban on guns for pilots. See the RoboPundit section for the stories and links. Some twit at trek30.sv.av.com also tried to hack RoboPundit, if you can believe that. What a sad little bastard.

— Kevin Hoover’s police blotter in the Arcata Eye is really one of the best examples of good, local, journalism in existence, and the story of how the Eye came into existence is a model of entrepreneurial excellence. But even Hoover has his critics, as we learn from this story in the Frisco Comical today:

“He makes up little poems and little sarcastic remarks about the common folks, street people and traveling kids who are the most common targets of the Arcata police state,” Wakan said. “Hoover . . . encourages the people of Arcata to laugh off oppression as they go about their middle- to upper-class day.”

The Comical is jealous, of course.

— David Brock claims that he went to UC Berkeley as a liberal, and had a conversion experience while writing a story on Jean Kirkpatrick’s 1983 speech there. The way Brock tells the tale, he was so appalled by the way Kirkpatrick was treated that he rejected his liberal values and went over to the Right. Like so much of what Brock has written, this story is completely false, as Will Harper discovered in the course of researching Brock’s college days for the East Bay Express:

When Kirkpatrick came to Berkeley, the byline atop the Daily Cal’s coverage was not Brock’s. It belonged to Chris Norton, a freelance writer who contributed news stories and editorials about US foreign policy. Back issues of the February 16, 1983 paper show Norton’s name beneath the lead headline “Kirkpatrick clashes with hecklers over US policy.” “Someone told me to go cover this and I said okay,” says Norton, who later became a Central American correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and Newsday. “He didn’t write the story; I wrote the story,” adds Norton, who expressed disbelief when told that Brock claims to have written that day’s main story. Indeed, Brock did not have any story in the paper that day.

Harper interviewed 19 people who worked at the Daily Cal during Brock’s tenure, and unearthed nothing but contradictions of Brock’s accounts of the Kirkpatrick visit and his alleged conversion. The only consistency to David Brock is life-long practice of dissembling, exaggerating, and self-glorification.

— This post from web elf Matt Haughey on Jarvis’ Big Idea is interesting, in a way:

I’m skeptical of paid journalists in general, and the media outlets that employ them. I’ve always tried to maintain a healthy skepticism of weblogs (especially post-Kaycee), but it’s usually easy to spot a writer’s bias, opinions, and general viewpoint on subjects that cross their site. Thowing [sic] money into the mix would no doubt spike my bullshit detectors, as the motivation to post changes from personal satisfaction to personal checking accounts.

It never ceases to amaze me that some technicians, generally of the Chomskyite school, feel that other professionals have an obligation to give their services away for free. Would this post sound at all rational if we substituted the word “programmers” for “journalists?”

But there is a segment of the blogging public that undoubtedly believes that blogging is Free Journalism, just as they believe Open Source is Free Software (incidentally, Open Source dude Eric Raymond is blogging now, as a 2A libber) But the reality of Free Software is that much of it’s written by consultants as a resume-builder, for which they’re compensated in contracts, and the rest is written by employees of service companies like Red Hat as part of an overall business plan. There’s no real difference between a programmer at VA Linux or one at Microsoft, except the Microsoft guy is better-paid. Similarly, many journalists publish blogs for the interaction with their readers, and they’re compensated by the tips they’re sent which they can turn into articles for sale.

The aversion to Filthy Lucre is characteristic of a certain privilege and a certain age; it’s quaint, but shallow and counter-productive.

Most of the commentors on this subject listed on Daypop are pretty threatened by it, objecting to money for blogging much more strongly than young Matt. Would-be blogger dominatrix Rebecca Blood sneers at paid blogging even as she flogs her “How to Blog” book, filled, no doubt, with information given to her for free by generous people.

BTW, did you need a “How to” book to get started? Did anyone you know need one? Is there anything that could be crammed into a book that you couldn’t learn better from seeing 20 or 30 good examples? I didn’t think so.

UPDATE: Matt’s post, as a whole, isn’t as bad as the bit I posted; he makes many criticisms of journos working for Old and Big Media which are correct. He errs, I believe, in placing the blame for sloppy and biased journalism on money, and not on the nature of journos and their bosses themselves. When gifted writers can make a living exploring their own interests on the web, without editorial boards and metro editors telling them what to do and when to do it, the world will be a better place.

— This Jerry Springer Show on Philosophy hasn’t made it to the tapes yet:

Tina: Louis … I’ve loved you for a long time …

Louis: I love you, too, Tina.

Tina: Louis, you know I agree with you that existence precedes essence, but … well, I just want to tell you I’ve been reading Nietzsche lately, and I don’t think I can agree with your egalitarian politics any more.

Crowd: Wooooo! Woooooo!

Louis: [shocked and disbelieving] Tina, this is crazy. You know that Sartre clarified all this way back in the 40s.

Tina: But he didn’t take into account Nietzsche’s radical critique of democratic morality, Louis. I’m sorry. I can’t ignore the contradiction any longer!

Louis: You got these ideas from Victor, didn’t you? Didn’t you?

Link courtesy of the essential Ms. Harris, for the enjoyment of Peter (Ubermensch) Pribik.

— Go on over to The Blogs of War and give Dr. Frank some cash.