Blogging Gets Mad Respect

A pleasure to wake up to my morning paper and see a great big page-one story on Josh Marshall and the Talking Points Memo empire, specifically acknowledging their role in pushing the Purged Prosecutors story, as well as their role in previous stories (Social Security, Trent Lott's Strom Thurmond comments), and doing a fine job of covering the history of blogging and its place in the future of journalism and politics. McDermott dispatches with the "bloggers are pajama-wearing incivil dirty fucking hippies" myth in the space of two sentences, and shows a real engagement with the medium and the subject. Put it this way, it was better than the WaPo profile of Maryscott O'Connor last year, which sought to put her in the worst possible light to fulfill journalistic biases about blogging. You simply can't do that with Josh; he comes from the world of journalism, first of all, and he has succeeded in doing original reporting in a unique way, relying on the readership to advance a story in many cases.

My only quibble was this line:

Neither side in the blog-MSM debate seems to have great appreciation for what the other brings to the party.

That's wrong. I have a deep appreciation for the tradition of journalism. That's why I do this, because I see journalism, and it's near-fetishistic striving for fake "neutrality," (a topic McDermott addresses, to his credit) and susceptibility to spin, is really crushing its value. The power-holders have found a Trojan Horse into the system of journalism, enabling them to tailor their message to the public by relying on human foibles like vanity and sloth and the tendency to think your friends are being honest with you. Bloggers, at least on the left, are calling for a RETURN to the tradition of journalism, out of respect for the medium and its power to shape the American agenda.

I'm in the midst of a back-and-forth with a blogger on the right currently, and while he's now descended into calling me names and sayiing my arguments are bullshit without saying why, for a moment there he was conceding things and I was conceding things, and there was some actual analysis the likes of which you wouldn't see in a newspaper, simply because the medium doesn't lend itself to it. Print is most certainly not dead, but it does need to think about the way it's been doing business for the past 70 years and make sure it's living up to its responsibilities to challenge the powerful instead of merging with them. Ultimately I think this criticism makes BOTH sides of the journalism/blogger divide better.

Greg Sargent has more.

Blogging isn't just a challenge to journalism, it's a new kind of journalism which -- while it has tons and tons of work to do -- is starting to boast successes that are compelling practitioners of the older form to recognize its legitimacy.

More broadly -- and lest you dismiss this as overly self-hyping, keep in mind that this blog and its author had no significant role in the Attorney Purge coverage -- it's not outlandish to suppose that we'll look back at the Attorney Purge story as another key moment in the history of blogging. Perhaps we'll see it as a moment at which the perceptions of the blogosphere harbored by many professional journalists underwent another fundamental shift -- even a transformative one.