Still Clueless After All These Years
Posted by: Dean Barnett
TownHall Blog
Whenever the dinosaurs that stumble around the mainstream media offer commentary on the blogosphere, I’m always astonished by how utterly clueless they are. There are of course exceptions. I communicate with a handful of professional class pundits who read blogs and they know the score. But most of their colleagues? They’re happily befuddled and determinedly ignorant, even though they fancy themselves experts on the subject that happens to pose an existential threat to the way they make a living.
This Ellen Goodman piece from Thursday got me thinking about some of the media Bigfoots’ blissful ignorance. A mere two weeks after the whole thing went down, Ms.Goodman waddled onto the scene to help make sense of the “John Edwards and His Nutty Bloggers Affair.” Here’s Goodmans’ takeaway:
<<< Bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan came in from the heady environment of the blogosphere to the more staid climate of presidential politics, to work for former senator John Edwards.
The political cyberspace where they were known as Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister is usually described with such euphemisms as "raucous" and "freewheeling."
On that terrain, no weasel wordsmiths need apply. You win attention with controversy and get hits with an over-the-top persona and a vivid vocabulary. A campaign, on the other hand, no matter how much it wants netroots, is, well, controversy-averse.
Marcotte's blog style was described by Time magazine as "issues-based but not above snark and a healthy dose of profanity." McEwan describes herself as a "firebrand" opponent of theocracy: "I am, however, vulgar. And I am trash-talking." >>>
There are two things that bug me about Goodman’s summation. The first is her apparent complete ignorance with the work of the Silk Pony’s former blogresses. The terms “raucous”, “freewheeling”, “over-the–top persona” and “vivid vocabulary” may all be strictly accurate but they completely miss the point of why Marcotte’s work created such a political dung-storm.
Marcotte may be all these things, but what should have disqualified her from serving on a campaign was the fact that her oft-repeated views were way outside the mainstream and likely to offend most people. In short, it wasn’t a matter of style but one of substance.
People like Goodman, who obviously don’t know even the barebones of this drama, think that Marcotte ran aground because eagle-eyed conservative antagonists pored through her archives and unearthed a few incriminating statements. Quite the contrary, Marcotte’s lunacy is on display virtually every day that she blogs. Almost all her posts reveal a boundless hostility for people of faith and her arch-nemesis, “the patriarchy.” You didn’t have to scour her archives to find evidence of her bizarre worldview. To her perverse credit, she lets it hang out every day.
Just this past Thursday, Marcotte took her odd hostility and contrarian streak out for one of their routine strolls around the blogosphere. This time, she was writing an essay defending the notion that “abortion is a moral good.” The former Edwards apparatchik opined,
<<< “Abortion, not just the right to abortion but the actual procedure, is a moral good that helps women and families and should be honored as such. Women who get abortions should be recognized as people who can accurately weigh their choices and make the most moral one.” >>>
Even if you like her argument, you still have to concede that a politician who embraces such a view is a fool. Or ignorant. Oh, and one more thing about the “abortion is a moral good” post: By Marcotte’s standards, it is an unusually thoughtful and restrained peace. It lacks any of her customary obscenities and enraged references to the patriarchy.
SO GOODMAN GOT MARCOTTE AND HER Pandagon site wrong. No big deal there. Those of us familiar with Marcotte’s oeuvre were shocked by the hiring, and were even more shocked that the Edwards campaign was surprised by the ensuing media hullabaloo. In short, if the Edwards campaign was so ignorant about its high profile blogger, it’s somewhat forgivable that Ellen Goodman would be comparably in the dark.
But what really grates is Goodman’s summation about the blogosphere, that “you win attention with controversy and get hits with an over-the-top persona and a vivid vocabulary.” Really now – what blogosphere is she watching?
On NZ Bear’s Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, the top-rated conservative blogs are Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, Powerline, Captain’s Quarters, Hot Air and our own humble little Hugh Hewitt site. All of these sites eschew a “vivid vocabulary.” I bet you could read all of us for a week and not find a single naughty word on any of our sites.
As for us all being over-the-top personalities, I would disagree. I agree we’re all personalities, but certainly no more so than Maureen Dowd. I’d posit that we write livelier stuff than most op-ed columnists, but that’s only because the bar in that regard has been set so very low.
There are many outstanding op-ed columnists out there like Jack Kelley, Jeff Jacoby and Charles Krauthammer. But there are scores more who write boring drivel that is neither interesting nor lively. If you look at your local newspaper, you’ll probably be able to quickly identify a handful of columnists who take up thousands of column inches a year and yet still somehow avoid ever saying anything original, interesting or amusing.
Even on the left, most of the prominent progressive blogs have cleaned up their acts considerably in the past few years. The Daily Kos front pagers generally avoid obscenities and outrageousness, or a lot more than they used to anyway. The far more thoughtful MyDD site does better on both fronts. Although I disagree with virtually everything that they write, the MyDD bloggers have neither vivid vocabularies nor over-the-top personalities. I would even argue that a few of them hardly have personalities at all.
American Prospecters Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias blog even more thoughtfully from the left. A campaign that hired either of them would have nothing to worry about regarding their past blogging efforts. Almost needless to say, all of the previously named bloggers are much more well-known and well-regarded than either of the Edwards campaign’s former blogresses.
WHEN I READ A PIECE LIKE GOODMAN’S, it shocks me on many levels. Goodman obviously knew nothing about the subject that she so omnisciently addressed. Articles like this one are yet another painful death rattle from the mainstream media. That its big-names can be so blissfully ignorant provides further evidence for why so many people are seeking their news elsewhere.
One further shudders to think that Goodman and her ilk bring similar “expertise” to matters far more significant, matters of life and death. It’s further cause for concern that in some quarters, their opinions are valued.
Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com
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