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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (93075)	12/31/2004 8:33:05 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793917

Reasonable people can debate which methods of euthanasia are more or less humane, which are acceptable and which aren't. It is an ethical question. My objection was to your dismissing an ethical question as merely a PC matter. As for the ethical question, I am more exercised over the apparently cavalier attitude of those who disposed of the cat. The Wal-Mart didn't have any more efficient weapons than a pellet gun? And the community didn't have any animal rescuers? I doubt both. Which means that the parties didn't give a damn about causing the cat to suffer. I don't find that acceptable. And I don't thing that's PC of me. I know that you are a supporter of the Giuliani approach to trash and broken windows. This is the same thing. Cultures that are careless of the suffering of animals move on to humans. Sticking up for a cat is fixing a broken window.

To: LindyBill who wrote (93075)	12/31/2004 9:16:12 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793917

Instapundit.com - MICHAEL POLLARD WRITES: Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber writes that "bloggers like Glenn Reynolds .... think that blogs should replace the mainstream media." I don't think you've written anything that can be fairly interpreted this way, but perhaps I've misread you? I note that in this post you write that "the political blogosphere is to a large degree about media criticism," and you approvingly quote a reader's comment that "Blogs are the letter to the editor that the editor does not want to print." (Here's another post where you cast bloggers largely as media critics.) Doesn't sound like you regard bloggers as a replacement (or even potential replacement) for the MSM. On the other hand, you've also "pushed the concept of bloggers as news collectors". I don't get the impression that you think news collecting blogs will someday replace the Washington Post and New York Times, but like I said, maybe I've misunderstood you. Care to address Farrell's post directly? Well, okay. First, Farrell says that I "seem" to believe that blogs will replace big media, and maybe to him I do seem that way, though I can't think of what I might have written to that effect, and apparently neither can he as he provides no link or quote. So maybe he's just characterizing my views that way so as to create an apparent contradiction that he can exploit. . . . But I don't think I've ever said that that blogs will replace Big Media. (As I have said, it's possible to imagine some sort of distributed news-collective that would do the same kind of work that newspapers or TV networks do, but there's nothing like that in existence, and if there were it wouldn't be a blog). I've characterized the relationship between the blogosphere and the legacysphere as symbiotic, with the prediction that blogging would remain an amateur activity by and large. And it is, at least overall. Jay Rosen is right when he says the shift is as much tonal as structural, with blogs forcing a conversation. My hope (not borne out as much as I'd have liked) has been that blogs would pressure Big Media to do a better job, both by criticism and by force of example. I also think that blogs do a lot to produce reporting of things that Big Media can't or won't report -- with the tsunami reportage and the AP bogus-boos story being examples from each category. I also thing that blogs (and the Internet in general, via things like CraigsList) are pulling eyeballs from Big Media, for which there is considerable evidence. But that hardly boils down to a claim that blogs will replace Big Media, and I don't know where Farrell gets that idea. Neither, apparently, does he, as he provides no sourcing. Farrell also conflates InstaPundit with the blogosphere as a whole, by suggesting that my statement that InstaPundit is not a news service somehow means that the blogosphere isn't up to news-gathering. InstaPundit is mostly about punditry (hence the name) but many other blogs are otherwise. Via this conflation, though, we get a claim of hypocrisy on my part: The argument is: Reynolds thinks blogs should replace Big Media; Reynolds admits he can't cover everything; Therefore Reynolds is a hypocrite. So we have an unsupported mischaracterization of my opinion, followed by a duck-and-switch in which InstaPundit is equated with the blogosphere, leading to a charge of hypocrisy. Farrell's treatment of this issue -- in which he accuses me of engaging in a dodge when I say I'm not a news service -- is rather dodgy itself, sloppiness bordering on dishonesty, and does him no credit. What's more -- and Farrell really knows too much to make this sort of mistake, I would think -- individual blogs aren't the unit of analysis, the blogosphere is. Unlike Big Media, who until recently could black out a story with the agreement of a very small number of players, bloggers can't do that. If I had ignored the tsunami, or RatherGate, other people would have covered it. That's a fundamental difference in media, and hence in responsibilities in terms of inclusiveness. (And it cuts both ways, as I suggest in a response to Chuck Divine in the comments to this post by Rand Simberg.) Farrell wants to carve out a niche as a scholar of the blogosphere, and he's done some interesting work together with Daniel Drezner. Posts like this one, however, make me wonder how reliable his insights are likely to be.