Fifth Estate
Reynolds, lacking fire, has a typically dispassionate sneaker party all over a Star-Ledger scribbler who can’t tell punditry from reporting and apparently isn’t aware how indispensible Internet freelancers have become to people who actually want to know what is happening in war zones. For example.
Look, I entirely agree with Mulshine’s point about the need for news professionals. As Reynolds notes, the economics of this thing aren’t working. We need professionals in large numbers to work the stories and the sources. We need professional news organizations, and editors. All of which have return addresses and — no cruel jokes please or use of my own words against me — some level of professionalism and accountability. They are the source of a lot of the raw data that is scrutinized and reprocessed by the blogosphere, even when it is used against said professionals. I’d also dicker with Reynolds’ point that anyone can do punditry. True, but the ones who do it best are often professionals themselves … people who are in the scribbling/reporting business, in law, with military backgrounds, etc. They’ve just had it with the status quo, which involves waiting politely for Mulshine’s bosses to give a damn what they think, and have used the Internet to cut out on their own. (Though Theo Spark plants and pulls spuds for a living, and who’s to say what he does isn’t critical social commentary … with totty! Then there’s Iowahawk. I don’t even know what he does for a living, something in Iowa, I guess. Yeah, society would function fine without him. It would just suck more. He gets an estate all his own: Iowahawk, the Sixth Estate.)
But someone needs to tell Mulshine about the important role that the blogosphere he is dismissing has played in keeping professionals honest.
It’s tireless work, done for little or no money, and there is no end to it, as the recent election shows. Where would most people have found out anything about Obama … or anything true and relevant about Palin … without the blogosphere, anyway? Who would there be to continue tirelessly pointing out what a bad joke Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize is, especially now that its fundamental premise is … cooling off. Meanwhile, Dan Rather is spending his days muttering to himself when he isn’t muttering to lawyers who are milking him with a multi-million-dollar lawsuit that’s going nowhere. I don’t know what Adnan Hajj is doing these days, since his Beirut Photoshop got shuttered. I don’t even want to talk about what the Iraq war coverage was like. It’s OK, almost everyone knows we’re winning there now, but it’s never too late to abandon Afghanistan.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:14 pm on Saturday, December 27, 2008
5 Responses to “Fifth Estate”
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December 28th, 2008 at 10:25 am
[...] Jules Crittenden rips apart a whiny reporter who was complaining about bloggers [...]
December 28th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden, Wake up America, The Other McCain, Ed Driscoll.com and Fausta’s Blog Technorati Tags: [...]
December 28th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Snark aside, I’m dismayed by the deterioration of actual news reporting. If our daily rag had not descended into the swamp of political partisanship, we’d still be getting our news from it. Instead, all our national and international news comes from online sources (not just blogs) and (sometimes) TV. We’re able to glean far more detail that way, and piece together what’s actually happening, instead of just “what’s good for us to know”.
December 28th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
“But someone needs to tell Mulshine about the important role that the blogosphere he is dismissing has played in keeping professionals honest.”
- - - -
Um, you mean how they’ve utterly failed to keep them honest? That “important role”?
Mulshine wants our respect and patronage, based on his superior writing skills and the ability that his ilk have to go out and investigate. Without those two things, he thinks to himself, bloggers are just graffiti taggers writ large.
But that’s not enough to deserve our respect. We need to have some confidence that our “news” delivery system isn’t skewing what it shows us in service to its own political bent, and we no longer have that confidence.
If he and his buds can somehow go back to reporting, instead of investigating, and then skillfully writing, campaign polemics - if I can turn to his work and, when finished, feel that I’ve read things that are accurate, complete, and don’t merely secretly advocate by omission, he may have a chance. As it is, he’s now part of a large group of people all looking for jobs writing ads for campaigns.
December 28th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
[...] Jules Crittenden of Pajamas Media: [...]