Gene Lyons: Bloggers Love Him, And The Feeling Is Sort of Mutual ;-))

Blogs defogged
Gene Lyons

BLOGS DEFOGGED
By Gene Lyons (Arkansas Post Gazette (c))

Posted on Wednesday, August 4, 2004

Many normal, red-blooded Americans who, like me, tuned to the Democratic National Convention between innings of TV baseball games may have found themselves mystified by references to "blogs" or "blogging." Depending upon which network you watched, the Democrats’ awarding press credentials allowing politically oriented bloggers to cover the Boston convention alongside board-certified professional pundits was either a very trendy, cuttingedge move or yet another sign of the decline and fall of practically everything. The term "blog" is a contraction of "Web log," a running electronic diary posted on the Internet by egotistical lone dementoes who, unlike us modest, self-effacing newspaper columnists, often have no professional training whatsoever. (Even if, like mine, that training consisted mainly of being yelled at by incredulous editors. "You didn’t call him? Whaddaya mean you didn’t call him? Are you crazy? ")

Writing in The New York Times, one Jennifer 8. Lee, a reporter whose middle name is an Arabic numeral, found a journalism professor who deplored the practice.

" I think that bloggers have put the issue of professionalism under attack, "said Thomas McPhail, professor of media studies at the University of Missouri-St. Louis." They have no pretense to objectivity. They don’t cover both sides. "

It’s tempting to ask how closely McPhail has followed the recent history of the newspaper interviewing him. In recent years, the Timeshas devoted more space apologizing for its own huge blunders than celebrating chic restaurants in SoHo.

But it’s not tempting enough to give him a call. Let’s move along here. McPhail also proposes that journalists be" professionally credentialed, "a boon to Jschool profs, but a bane to the nation. Journalism is a trade best learned by doing; academically, it’s a discipline in search of a subject matter. The" board-certified "bit above was a joke. So is licensing pundits. Things are bad enough already.

Anyhow, like my own crusades against breast implants and the designated hitter, McPhail’s idea is going nowhere.

Blogger" Atrios" responded tartly on his site, atrios. blogspot. com, to condescending reports in the "mainstream" media. "[T] hey spend a lot of time talking about how we don’t have ‘editors ?’ or ‘factcheckers ?’ and how you just can’t trust that stuff you read in the Internet," he noted. Then he pasted in CNN transcripts of Judy Woodruff citing unconfirmed nonsense from "The Drudge Report" about John Kerry’s expensive haircuts and Wolf Blitzer alluding to unspecified "weird aspects" of former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s private life.

Chastised, Blitzer blamed Bush administration officials who later backed off, seemingly realizing that smearing Clarke would do more harm than good. Nevertheless, Atrios made his point: Being scolded about journalistic ethics by cable TV celebrities is like being faulted for bad taste by Paris Hilton.

During the Democratic convention, for example, the blogger who got the most TV face time was "Wonkette," a. k. a. Ana Marie Cox, who happens to be quite a looker. Her site, wonkette. com, specializes in ribald Washington gossip of no interest. A characteristic recent item concerned ABC’s George Stephanopoulos being spotted checking his e-mail in the men’s room, along with raunchy speculation about—well, never mind.

The real significance of politically oriented weblogs, however, lies precisely in the challenge they pose to spin-driven "mainstream" media. If you only watched CNN, for example, you might not know that the "journalist" Teresa Heinz Kerry told to "shove it" worked for Richard Mellon Scaife’s Pittsburgh

Tribune-Review, a right-wing propaganda sheet that has made grotesquely false allegations against her and the charitable foundation she supports. After spending the 1990s "reporting" about Bill Clinton’s murders, Scaife’s sleuths have begun smearing the Kerrys.

Unlike the big leaguers, Atrios not only provided proper context (the "who" for budding professional journalists), but linked to articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that city’s real newspaper, detailing the absurdity of the Scaife charges.

Because his site links to everybody of interest, reading Atrios for a week would be the single best way I know to get oriented with Democratic-accented weblogs. Now that Atrios has unmasked himself as Duncan Black, a Philadelphia economist with a Ph. D. from Brown University, the absurd rumor that your humble, obedient servant here was responsible for this invaluable site can be put to rest. Other blogs I’d be flattered to be associated with include "The Daily Howler" (dailyhowler. com), Bob Somerby’s brilliantly iconoclastic takedown of journalistic folly; Joshua Micah Marshall’s scholarly, but lively "Talking Points Memo" (talkingpointsmemo. com); Eric Alterman’s "Altercations" (altercation. msnbc. com); and Kevin Drum, a. k. a. "Calpundit," currently on-line at washingtonmonthly. com. Would that I could also recommend the incomparable mediawhoresonline. com, the funniest, most fearless weblog of all, but the mystery woman who began it during the 2000 Florida vote-counting fiasco that brought us the Bush administration has put her site (again, not mine) on hiatus. Maybe if we close our eyes and wish like Tinkerbell, she’ll bring it back online between now and November.

• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.