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Drooling on the Pillow

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Tina Brown 

Let's all admit it, we all read and enjoyed Maureen Dowd when she was beating up on Boy Clinton. As I've said before, when the thing that is pursued is something that you love, it's a witchhunt. When the object of pursuit is a thing that you hate, it looks very much like justice.

Still, she's pretty much of an idiot, isn't she?

On the other hand, Tina Brown is a scribestress with whom I very rarely agree, but never miss reading. The gal can write and she almost always has something to say. These days, she's saying it in the New York Sun.
The age of the blogosphere has produced a new genre
of mainstream journalism: fake transparency. The New
York Times has become its foremost practitioner. The
paper of record has been arraigned for arrogance so
many times in the last three years that it has forgotten
how useful arrogance can be. The Gulliver of West 43rd
Street has gotten so spooked that now it preemptively
lies down, affixes bonds to its wrists and ankles, and
invites the Lilliputians of cyberspace to walk all over it.
The article tries to pin what she sees as a anxious vacuousness in the major media on blogs "baying to be fed" but, really, the truncation of the news cycle has much more to do with cable news, doesn't it? Blogs are still largely reactive. Those that project political fantasy and paranoia drive nothing except brief bubbles, quickly 'edited' by the self-correcting distributed model of the blog information system.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the seething cauldrons of subterranean magma at DU and Freep do move the polity by heaving up caldera over which actual information has to flow. I tend to think of them as political porn shops, though, where deviants can harmlessly gather. Sure, there will be incidents from time to time, but isn't it better to give them a place to let off steam before they hurt someone?

Major media complaints about the corrosive and corrupting influence of blogs are a little embarrassing, like GM whining about skateboards.

Read the article for an amusing and informative take on the Judith Miller fiasco, but forgive the blog-bashing as the reflexive notions of an on-dead-tree lifer.
Posted by: Sluggo / 11:20 AM
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