The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Rago really, really doesn’t like bloggers:
The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.
Picking on the scraps ? You mean like the bloggers who uncovered the truth behind the CBS memo-gate story which the MSM only picked up because it was being talked about all over the blogosphere ? Or the bloggers in places like Iraq and Iran providing a real-time insight into events that reporters only see second-hand ?
Blogging isn’t going to replace journalism, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for non-journalists who can present their own point-of-view on a subject.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . .
The way we write affects both style and substance. The loquacious formulations of late Henry James, for instance, owe in part to his arthritis, which made longhand impossible, and instead he dictated his writing to a secretary. In this aspect, journalism as practiced via blog appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form. Its closest analogue might be the (poorly kept) diary or commonplace book, or the note scrawled to oneself on the back of an envelope–though these things are not meant for public consumption. The reason for a blog’s being is: Here’s my opinion, right now.
And what’s so wrong with that ? Part of the tradition that bloggers have taken over is that of the pamphleteers who played a big role in political debate in the early part of American history. They are a way for people to express their opinions and shape the debate outside of the control of the mainstream media. Apparently, Mr. Rago doesn’t like that lack of control.
