Wall Street Journal Taking Blogs Way Too Seriously
NEWSPAPER STILL MAKES GOOD POINTS EVEN AS IT SHOVES IT UP THE BLOGOSPHERE’S YIN-YANG
FITSNews - December 20 - We love the Wall Street Journal, we really do. They are truly our brothers in the fiscal conservative struggle and probably the only paper in North America that prints what actually happened in the world the day before as opposed to what Barbra Streisand and Michael Moore want you to think happened.
Basically, FITSNews and the Wall Street Journal are like peas and carrots, or like the obligatory MTV Real World episode each season where the cast of insanely attractive men and women in their twenties actually leave the house and work together to build a playground for underprivileged kids, except in this case we also teach the underprivileged kids about the Laffer curve, the value of hard work and remind them not to believe anything that comes out of Dan Rather’s big fat lying mouth.
That’s why we took it in stride when today’s WSJ opinion page (a.k.a. our Daily Scripture) featured a column by WSJ Assistant Features Editor Joseph Rago dismissing bloggers as an unruly mob and blog sites as being “written by fools and read by idiots.”
“Every conceivable belief is on the scene,” Rago writes. “But the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion.”
Logorrheic? Solipsistic? Sorry, we were just picturing Rocky Balboa using those words in casual conversation.
But Rago continues, “Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line. Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions –John Kerry always providing useful material –while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq. Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.”
Frankly, we don’t know what the hell a “jot” is (and we’re definitely taking the under on whether or not Mr. Rago has gotten laid since the turn of the Millennium), but let’s be honest, he makes some good points.
Blogs are the flavor of the month, to be sure, but as anybody here in South Carolina who’s pinballed back and forth between the Body Politic and the Laurinline (and back) knows, they are remarkably predictible.
Take our state’s recent Superintendent of Education race, for example. The Body Politic might as well have been Republican Karen Floyd’s campaign website while the Laurinline might as well have been Democrat Jim Rex’s. Both blogs totally surrendered their capacity to think objectively.
So while we may not know what every one of Mr. Rago’s $50 words means, we’re pretty sure that if someone defined them for us, we’d agree with him. We’d probably also congratulate him on his diction. And then offer him a much-needed lap dance.
Comments
Trackbacks