> The mainstream media, in blogger-ese. That about which they
> ceaselessly complain, but without which they'd have nothing to say.
This is unfair. The best of the pwog/lefty bloggers offer a compelling mixture of opinion and analysis which, indeed, is largely based on current affairs as reported by the MSM, and of which an important facet is media criticism. A sterling example is Juan Cole. What's wrong with that?
No blogger that I know of claims to be an alternative to the NYT, BBC etc. They are adjuncts, just as The Nation, LBO, and a host of other weekly, monthly, etc., publications are.
On 6/17/06, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> Railing against blogs due to a large number of sorry blogs is like
> railing against poetry due to a large number of sorry poems or against
> email due to a large number of sorry messages.
Thank you, Yoshie, for injecting some common sense into this discussion. Complaint's about the contemporary blogosphere reminds me of similar complaints about the Net in 1996 of thereabouts, when people first started putting up home pages en masse. Sure, a lot of it was junk. But soon it became apparent that there was a lot of useful information coming online too. Now it is a moot point.
Many of the blogs are notable not so much for the blog postings as the comment sections; hence, they are first and foremost social spaces for like-minded people. Sure, some may resemble 'circle jerks', as Doug referred to dKos a few weeks ago. However, it is not like lbo-talk is entirely free from onanism, given some of the discussions of Heidegger here of late.
On 6/17/06, John Adams <jadams01 at sprynet.com> wrote:
> I thought it was telling that when TimesSelect came in, the blogosphere (I hate that word) screamed about loosing access to NYT op-eds.
>
> All that news, still available for free, but it was OPP (other people's punditry) they cared about the most.
I don't recall bloggers screaming so much as simply pointing out that the NYT was going against the current, so to speak. By putting up a wall between itself and the blogosphere, it was seen as withdrawing from the debate.
Of course, the more paranoid observers suspect it that it was to contain Krugman.
--
Colin Brace
Amsterdam