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Elon Professor Micheal Skube skewered bloggers Sunday in an op-ed column published in the Los Angeles Times entitled “Blogs: All The Noise That Fits.” And in doing so, he invoked the name and words of the eminent cultural critic Christopher Lasch to support his thesis. Wrote Skube:

"What democracy requires," Lasch wrote in "The Lost Art of Argument," "is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can only be generated by debate. We do not know what we need until we ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of public controversy.”

There was something appealing about this argument -- one that no blogger would reject -- when Lasch advanced it almost two decades ago. But now we have the opportunity to witness it in practice, thanks to the blogosphere, and the results are less than satisfying. One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more. The opinions are occasionally informed, often tiresomely cranky and never in doubt. Skepticism, restraint, a willingness to suspect judgment and to put oneself in the background -- these would not seem to be a blogger's trademarks.

But they are, more often than not, trademarks of the kind of journalism that makes a difference.

So what Skube is trying to say is that bloggers are cheapening public debate – in the Laschian sense – because they are too opinionated, unrestrained and self-righteous. Now, it’s not as if I’m Will Hunting and Lasch is Vickers’ “Work in Essex County,” but Skube is guilty of a little bit of selective quoting when it comes to Mr. Lasch.

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