Turf squabble, MSM vs Blogs

I've written before about my frustration with people who trash the message because of the medium -- those who would discount something because it was found on a blog or written by a blogger. As if being a blogger precluded the possibility of being a thoughtful, articulate, informed person as well. I have often joked that nothing makes me respect someone more than to have them agree with me. Greg Sargent, writing at the American Prospect, gets high praise from me for his article called The Blog Rage Canard because he makes the point better than I do. He calls this MSM concern about "blog rage" a canard because:

it’s actually about the efforts of bloggers to establish the legitimacy of their medium, and about the reluctance of major news organizations and their employees to recognize that legitimacy.

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Bloggers are also a threat because they're in the process of making the opinion-generating profession a purely meritocratic one.

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Now, all of a sudden, anyone can come along and, with little to no overhead, offer pretty much exactly the same thing. Aside from some obvious differences -- bloggers sometimes double as political activists, and the idiom is different in some ways -- the truth is that bloggers essentially offer exactly what Klein does: Words on a screen which are meant to help the reader interpret current affairs and politics. What’s more -- and here’s the real crux of the matter -- readers are choosing between the words on a screen offered by Klein and other commentators and the words on a screen offered by bloggers on the basis of one thing alone: The quality of the work.

Before, Joe Klein and his colleagues enjoyed an exclusive perch, one that was maintained for them by the folks who controlled the systems that, previously, were the only ways commentary and news were disseminated. One could argue that columnists earn their perches -- through hard work, experience and, occasionally, talent. But once they attain their position, their status is more or less protected -- both by the fact that news orgs rarely fire columnists and by the kind of de facto gentleman’s agreement that has long kept columnists from attacking each other too aggressively.

The blogosphere has shattered that comfy arrangement -- permanently. All of a sudden, there’s no longer a system in place that allows columnists to grow lazy, sloppy, or biased without facing consequences. Suddenly it's possible to pinpoint a commentator’s weak reasoning or inaccuracies and broadcast them far and wide. Suddenly underperforming columnists, and their editors, are no longer insulated from competition -- from bloggers who, as hard as this may be for established commentators to accept, actually do work that’s as good or better than they do.

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Yet Klein and other internet critics refuse to acknowledge this. Their criticism deliberately blurs the distinction between crappy, substandard work on blogs and high-quality work that stands toe to toe with much offered by major news orgs. The obvious subtext of their attacks is that there is something inherently wrong with content delivered via the blogosphere -- it's unruly, unpoliced territory, and bloggers themselves in any case are overly emotional or have questionable motives -- and therefore, everything puglished there should be seen as suspect. The content offered by main news organizations, by contrast, should be presumed to have validity. The blanket criticism of the "tone" of the blogosphere is driven by a refusal to acknowledge the substantive, high-quality content being offered -- it's all about tarring the blogosphere with one brush. Klein blasted “frothing” and “screeching” bloggers – when in fact, much of the criticism of him was measured, well-researched, and well-reasoned.

The good news is that this effort to paper over the distinction between bad blogging and the top-notch work that's being done is failing. Right now, readers are undeniably evaluating work based on its merits -- on its sensibility, wit, analysis, and intelligence -- rather than based on how it's reaching them or who’s publishing it. Readers see that some bloggers do high-quality journalism and are concluding that the mere fact that it’s reaching them via blogs doesn’t diminish the worth of that work in any way whatsoever. Readers are turning to bloggers to do what a handful of exalted columnists and their editors once did exclusively – that is, interpret the world for them. And that, not the tone or the supposedly destructive streak of bloggers, is the thing that’s really intimidating to the "MSM" about the blogosphere.