All Blog Posts from Public Eye

As discussed in this space last week, there’s a lot of inappropriate things said and done that are trumped up into Major Media Controversies. Left-leaning groups and right-leaning groups – the screaming monkeys on both sides – are always trying to publicize things and raise their profile on the nation’s agenda. So you weigh their claims see if the event meets the threshold for attention.

Bill O’Reilly’s insipid observation about African-American restaurants earlier this week seemed like a media diversion that – given all the other events this week – didn’t tip the scales into an actual problem.

But some things are outrages despite being spotlighted by ideological groups.

Take what was said this week by Rush Limbaugh, as reported on Talking Points Memo – inspired by the liberal group Media Matters -- yesterday:

In a conversation on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, a listener named Mike said that antiwar people never talk to "real soldiers," adding that they take their cues from soldiers who are against the war and "talk to the media."

To which Limbaugh rejoined: "The phony soldiers.”

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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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While some parts of the news industry are clearly scaling back, the blogosphere’s tentacles continue to reach further -- to the Web pages of Time.com as it turns out. Andrew Sullivan announced that his blog, The Daily Dish, will soon be hosted on Time’s Web site. He attempted to allay the concerns of those who doubted the blog’s ability to maintain, well, its blogginess:

“This is a blog. I won't be running posts before any editors before they appear. [And from the looks of that sentence, I think he means it.] I will continue to write simply what I believe or think, however misguided I may be. I will continue to correct any errors in the full light of day and change my mind if new events demand it or new facts compel it. I will try and air counter-arguments as often as possible. In other words: the essence of the blog won't change. You will still like it for the same reasons or hate it for the same reasons; or, as many of you keep telling me, both.”

Jeff Jarvis remained concerned anyway:

“They got it backwards. They should have left Sullivan right where we was and sold advertising there. That would have extended their reach to a new audience. They’re thinking the old way.”

And over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall’s empire continues to grow:

“We're going to launch a new blog dedicated to chronicling, explaining and reporting on the interconnected web of public corruption scandals bubbling up out of the reigning Washington political machine. As we move into next year the coverage will also expand into how these different stories are playing in congressional elections around the country. What are we raising the money for? Simple. Salaries.”

Let’s keep our fingers crossed, for Marshall’s sake at least, that the interconnected web of public corruption scandals continues to be spun.

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