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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (73378)	2/12/2003 1:49:52 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Mark Steyn has an interesting and varied interview, in the course of which he makes some comments on the blogosphere: I only discovered blogs - or "blogs", as we old-media types say - after Sept 11, when I started getting feedback from people who'd come across me via Instapundit and so on. I don't think it's any coincidence that blogs have been strongest in the US, where the dozy monodailies are so excruciatingly boring and where incredibly dull columnists seem able to hold down prime op-ed real estate for decade after decade. America's torpid j-school culture is killing American newspapers, both in style and content. Why, for example, does no print columnist have the curiosity to do what Charles Johnson does and make a specialty of finding out what the Muslim world is saying about the west? If this war ever ends, I figure I'll lose a lot of my blog admirers, because on the whole I'm a tad more socially conservative than they are. But I don't really care about that: you don't have to agree with Ken Layne to appreciate that the guy can write. I credited Megan McArdle in some column after some expert Europhile commentators in the English-speaking world were trying to play down Le Pen's performance in the French Presidential election - Le Pen only got a little more than he usually gets, pure fluke he came second, nothing to see here, move along. Megan said: "They're completely missing the point, which is that it's hilarious." I couldn't put it any better than that, so why not give her the credit? It's the pomposity of American print guys that's so breathtaking: I'm often quoted disapprovingly in American papers by columnists who go "someone by the name of Mark Steyn", "one Mark Steyn", "a Mark Steyn". What's up with that? Lewis Lapham did it a while back. I'll bet my weekly readership over his any day of the week. All he has to do is do a Nexis search and in ten minutes he'll know who I am. But these fellows are so status conscious that the effortless superiority is essential to their sense of themselves. The Internet doesn't have those kind of Kay Graham dinner-party seating hang-ups. rightwingnews.com Read the whole thing.