I had thought I had said all that needed to be said yesterday on the increasing, and increasingly vocalized, disdain and frustration many mainstream pundits and journalists express towards bloggers. I could have let it go and moved on, but I ran across the following pieces, which I offer for your perusal (actually, all of them need to be read to give context and depth to what follows):
- The inestimable Glenn Greenwald with a rundown and analysis of mainstream comments on the blogs.
- The equally inestimable Digby with a note on the glaring elitism and mindless paternalism of our Beltway pundit betters.
- Jonathan Alter gets a lesson in real journalistic ethics, when he declares an encounter he cannot remember is different from the way it actually appears on tape.
- Bradrocket at Sadly!No goes all Hulk over a forum offered to serial liar and psychopathic warmonger Richard Perle in the Washington Post.
The last is offered by way of an example of why we are so frustrated with the press; this man should be locked away, preferably on heavy Thorazine. Instead, he is treated as a serious commentator, given a forum to defend his horrid reputation, and lies over and over again in the process. Ugh!
All of these together offer a serious rebuttal to so much of the frothing of the establishment press, and provide the best evidence I can amass that the main problem the press has with blogs is this - we do not play by the rules.
Of course, this begs the all important question: Whose rules? Indeed, even if there are supposed to be rules, why should we follow them? Holy God in Heaven Most High, it isn't like the fate of our country isn't at stake, and we are concerned with pulling our collective selves back from the brink (if it isn't already too late). Let us, by all means, allow liars and fantasy-mongers like Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, Joe Lieberman, William Bennett - indeed all those in Tim Russert's rolodex at work - talk all they want without rebuttal. Let's treat them as if they have a shred of credibility or intellectual integrity. Why? Because those are the rules. That's the way the game is played. To call David Broder a tired old man who is so detached from reality he wouldn't recognize it if it came up and bit him on his shriveled ass isn't nice. It isn't decorous.
FUCK THE RULES!
Other than making sure we get our facts right (something not even our pundit class manages to do consistently), as far as I am concerned the stakes are far too high, the issues much too serious, and we are far too impassioned to allow ourselves to be suckered in to playing by the journalistic equivalent of the Marquis of Queensbury Rules. First of all, we're not journalists, but citizens speaking out, making our voices heard, attempting to move the beast of state in an alternate direction. Sometimes that takes shock therapy. To those pundits who wish we would all go away, or play nice, or observe some sort of artificial rule concerning propriety and the etiquette of public discourse, all I can say is that we citizens are tired of being told how to behave in public. It is our country at stake, and our voices are every bit as important, and seemingly more informed and intellectually honest, than most of what passes for political commentary. We are, to echo digby here, Real Americans (hell, I come from suburban Illinois; you don't get more Reagan Democratic Country than that), and our voices are the voices of real Americans mad as hell, scared as hell, and tired as hell.
We do not need spokespersons. We do not need a tired old man long past his prime to be our voice, because we have found our voice. If you don't like it, if you can't take the heat of a little criticism, my suggestion is you find another line of work, because we aren't going away, we aren't going to stop holding your feet to the fire, we aren't going to demand more and better of you, of our elected officials, of our public discourse in general. If the Kleins, Chaits, Alters, Friedmans, and the rest of the pundit class (and this is important to note; these aren't journalists in the sense of reporting news, but rather commentators upon the news, as "parasitic" [to use Joe Klein's infelicitous phrase] as we liberal bloggers) are unhappy, and wish we would all just imitate them, I think the reason we don't is quite simple.
You all, for the most part, suck.
You are intellectually dishonest. You want to appear fair to those who have long ago wasted any chance for deserved fairness. You want us to engage those who lack even a passing acquaintance with facts, with notions of fairness. This is not a question of being better than our adversaries; rather, it is an issue of intellectual integrity. As those on the other side of the political aisle are, to a person, dishonest, why should we take them seriously at all? Much better to call them liars and be done with it. Better yet, it's better to make fun of them for whining about being called out as liars, and lying about it in the process, rather than to take them seriously.
We are at a crossroads in the development of our public discourse here in America. We no longer take our cues from officially sanctioned sources, but have found a wealth of citizens who are intelligent, whose opinions are strong, nuanced, and based in fact. We push back against all the mainstream nonsense not because we are some nutty fringe folks who like to be aggressively contrary, but because it is nonsense. Our integrity grows with each attack upon it by those who would besmirch it (and drain their own integrity in the process), which is always a wonderful thing to behold.
This is a good discussion to be having, but we must be clear that behind this discussion lies something so serious, so all-encompassing, as to dwarf all of our concerns - our country is still led by a combination of barely-sane moral dwarves, and the acceptable level of debate is still far to narrow. Rescuing America from this particular group of thugs, congenital liars, criminals, and idiots is the most important thing. Whether we do it by being nice or by using dirty words, the most important thing is that we do it, and do it before we have passed the point of no return.
Virtual Tin Cup
