Nothing New About It
by digby
Kagro X over at Kos responds to Joe Klein's intemperate column today in which he takes bloggers to task for being ... intemperate.
He makes one point that I think it important for some of these journalists to understand:
My difference with Klein here is this: blogging hasn't changed things here. Some portion of your readership always thought these horrible things about you (though admittedly, there are probably plenty of people who have recently come to that). All blogs have done is allowed them to say it, and for you to hear it.
Speaking for myself, I have been recoiling from the political media for more than a decade. Joe Klein often made me very intemperate back when I read the dead tree versions of his column. Blogging just gave me a forum to express it publicly. And much to my surprise, I found that many, many other people felt exactly the same way. Just because we didn't have his email address or a comment section doesn't mean he hasn't been pissing off (and turning off) his readers for a very long time.
Something went very haywire in the political establishment during the 90's and picked up speed in this decade. I noticed it then and it motivated me to reignite my involvement in politics at a much later age than anyone would normally do it. And my impatience with the media was born of sheer frustration with people who consistently interpreted the world in a way that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the world that I saw with my own eyes.
There's a reason why the so-called liberal media is losing its audience and has been for a long time. Perhaps its practitioners ought to look in the mirror and ask themselves if it might be because they have been failing to properly do their jobs. (Or they could just read their emails without having a hissy fit every time someone gets "vituperative" and try to figure out if it might be something other than blogo-stalinism that makes them this way. It's ridiculous.)
And, by the way, Klein's column just led Brit Hume's show on Fox, with lots of juicy quotes about "free-range lunacy" and the "fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere."
Congratulations, Joe. Your friends at Fox, at least, appreciate all you do for the cause.
Update: David Frum at National Review has a slightly different take on it. He quotes this interesting new theory from Eli Lake:
I bet at least half of the netleft are failed professors, over-educated literary theory PHDs, who make themselves appear more numerous than they arethrough their anonymity and deliberate manipulation of google. Their real audience are the technocrat staffers for Dems on the Hill, who agreed with them that their bosses were pushovers during the Bush presidency.
What if the netleft, that has created the impression that there is a rising plurality that would like to abandon Iraqis to Qaeda, Quds and the Ba'ath, are just a few thousand committed Marxists in their pajamas? What if the Dems have strategically miscalculated? What if their over-compensation is to appease a vocal 1 percent of the electorate that actually draws contempt from the rest of the country?
Uh oh. They figured out our secret plan. Now they're going to ruin everything and run their campaigns for the real majority who want to stay in Iraq for evuh, and we will lose again. Damn their hides!
Update II : from Shawn Fassett in the comments, here's an interesting tid-bit about Frum. Nice work if you can get it...
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