December 23, 2006
On Blogs Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:55 PM EST An interesting op-ed on blogging by Joseph Rago, an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal, appeared on Wednesday, and you can read it here. Mr. Rago takes a very dim view of blogs, especially of political blogs. He quotes Joseph Conrad’s view of newspapers—“Written by fools to be read by imbeciles”—and points out that while bloggers happily take this view of the competition, it is equally applicable to their own effusions. By Mr. Rago’s account the relationship of bloggers to mainstream journalists resembles “remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps”: Bloggers do little or no reporting and write much too quickly; he dislikes their slapdash style, which he finds alternately too terse and too prolix, and he dislikes their tone, which he thinks runs to the mechanically adversarial. There is much to be said for these views, but they also apply to newspapers themselves, as Mr. Rago several times concedes. One of the most damaging charges Mr. Rago makes against political blogs—that they are usually preaching to the choir, and wind up reinforcing political convictions rather than challenging them—is by his own admission increasingly true of many other kinds of journalism. I do not expect to read a Murdoch paper, or listen to Fox cable, and encounter a sophisticated challenge to its owner’s views, nor do I not expect to see The New York Times run too many eloquent pieces challenging its own pieties on at least some subjects. Mr. Rago’s own paper has a pretty distinct ideological line on a number of questions, although it maintains a brighter line between news pages and opinion pages than do most papers. Some newspapers print a fair amount of powerful argument from the other side—the Israeli left-wing paper Ha’aretz is particularly admirable in this respect—but so do some blogs. The unusual mix of opinions on some of the busiest blogs can be striking—Instapundit is prowar and pro–gay rights, for example. It is dispiriting to hear readers of party-line blogs engage in pseudo-discussions, reciting only evidence that confirms preexisting views, but it is also dispiriting to listen to readers of some of our greatest newspapers paraphrase the day’s op-ed columns while suffering the delusion that they are engaging in thoughtful political analysis. I am not sure if Mr. Rago thinks newspapers are better than blogs at avoiding these sins; he seems cagey about committing himself on that question. One of the worst things about a blog—the qualities that derive from its having been written very quickly, with little time for reflection or editing—was long thought true of print and electronic journalism. Print journalism gets some editing, blogs in general none, but the difference is not always easy to spot; the very word “journalism” reflects the fact that the stuff was once produced daily, which meant hastily, and it is increasingly produced many times a day. Given the congruence of fault and flaw between the one form and the other, it is hard to escape the suspicion that journalists dislike bloggers because they are rate-busters, or to use an older and uglier word, scabs. The Internet allows anyone to publish, and erodes and dilutes the journalist’s sense of privileged exceptionalism. In the long run, maybe sooner, arguably already, this will also erode the journalist’s income as well. There is a poignancy about the timing of this erosive pressure, at least from the point of view of the journalists. Historically, most journalists were relatively low-status and badly paid employees. Rather recently, they became better paid and much higher status types, and some of them became celebrities, the sort of people journalists once merely wrote about, but this rise in status and income seems to have come right before a possibly vertiginous fall. In their defense, it is worth noting that blogs can do something print or electronic journalism cannot do, or at any rate have not done: They can very rapidly gather and publish informed comment from a wide variety of readers. When television journalists asserted that some memos incriminated George Bush, bloggers covering the story elicited a wealth of informed comment on what I would consider obscure topics (IBM Selectric typefaces at a particular moment, etc.). A lot of people know a lot of things, and almost none of those people are on the contact list of any journalist. I read an e-list nominally devoted to a particular author of alternate history, whose members regularly query what they call “the list mind.” On an amazing number of topics, the collective intellectual resources of that rather small list are staggering: how a dam fails, the history of technology, the physics of viscosity, historical demography, small arms, etc. I have been on journalists’ contact lists, and am myself a free-lance journalist, and in comparison with what I know as a contact, or what some of my sources have known, I find the breadth and depth of the “list mind” wholly remarkable. In this sense, the blogs do allow what bloggers piously call “citizen journalism” to exist, something that is new under the sun. In the old days, if you wrote to a newspaper about a gross error of fact, the letter was not necessarily published—in the case of some papers, it was never published—although it was handed on to the offending writer, who was free to sin again, and usually did. The bloggers have changed that. At least some cases of journalistic incompetence and arrogance are much more quickly, thoroughly, and widely exposed than they were only a few years ago. This makes journalists, who exult in widely exposing other forms of authority as incompetent and arrogant, more than a little irritable, which should surprise no one. Mr. Rago’s op-ed, which is pretty thoughtful about the causes and irreversibility of this trend, is a more impressive expression of irritability than one usually encounters.
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