The Blog Mob

Written by fools to be read by imbeciles

In this pithy essay, Elite Media Monoculture "journalist" Mr. Joseph Rago writes in The Wall Street Journal on how, in his royal opinion, bloggers are but a barnacle on the underside of modern media. How useful such an opinion may be to those in the "profession" of journalism may be judged by the continuing fact of collapsing readership and falling revenues at virtually every newspaper in the country while alternative media, including blogs and the Internet, flourish with abandon.

Naturally this state of affair produces an inconsolable Mr. Rago who, being a modern friar of the profession, sees no reason whatsoever that he should not be allowed to continue his sacred work, locked in his ivory tower with his parchments and quill pens endlessly improving the gilded pages of illustrated poetic prose over which editors by the hundreds have toiled and sacrificed for endless nights without so much as a Starbuck's Latte to relieve their unremitting torment.

Of course the real problem here for the supremely superior Mr. Rago is his failure to understand the nature of the Internet or the blogs which he so airily dismisses. Are there some blogs written badly? Sure there are. Do they vary widely in quality as well as subject? Of course they do. But their power is not to be found in how they may appear individually, but rather how they function collectively as a method of sifting through mountains of information to find patterns and facts which are overlooked or, more often, ignored by the dinosaur media.

This form of "open source" distributed information is very powerful indeed and it is the means by which bloggers over the past several years have found a virtually unending stream of media scandals from Dan Rather's memogate, to the lies of Eason Jordan, to doctored photos from Reuters. On and on we find that the Elite Media Monoculture abounds with distortion, bias and shoddy assumptions presented as "facts" which would all go unremarked were it not for the self-appointed guardians in the blogsphere who have made it their business to keep the elites on their toes, even if they can't be kept completely honest.

Without the bloggers, who are after all just regular Americans making their voices heard, so called "journalists" would have a free hand to do whatever they wish with no accountability at all. And as we all know, "journalists" all across the land are always in favor of accountability.

Just as long as it doesn't apply to them of course.