Dude, you get paid to state your opinion. Why do you care what some D&D-playing, popcorn eating, living in his mother's basement blogger is saying? I mean really. These guys want the megaphone, and then not the criticism. All power. No responsibility."I used to get a lot more on the right," said columnist Richard Cohen, who broke with liberals when he supported the Iraq war. More recently, the left has picked apart columns that are perceived as being favorable to John McCain.
"If you're a little bit critical of Barack Obama, you get really a pie of vilification right in the face," Cohen said, adding that his liberal critics "were born too late, because they would have been great communists."
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I'm with Matt. I just don't have much sympathy of people working at big newspapers whining about the netroots attacking them. Reporters--if they're doing their job--spend their lives bringing scrutiny to other people. There's something weak about complaining when someone does the same to you. Matt points to this particularly egregious quote by Richard Cohen:
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i find the amazing thin-skinnedness of many of our leading pundits and media figures quite astonishing, and i'm at a loss to explain it.
the closest i've come is this: during the clinton impeachment, i had a letter published in the nytimes, and an old friend saw it and called me (we no longer live in the same area). i told him that i only submitted the letter thanks to email - if i had to look up the address and type out a letter and print it and mail it i would have said "no matter how irritating this story is, it's not worth it to me to complain."
and so media figures lived in this world where maybe, 3-5 days after an article appeared, a letter showed up on the desk of the "letters to the editor" intern, and maybe it was even shown to the media figure (but probably not), and as a result, said media figures developed a worldview that said "what a great job i'm doing."
and now, thanks to email and blogs, thousands of people do what i did with that letter and this comes as a great shock to the media figures: they think that they are still doing a great job, nothing has changed, and there's just this irrational hatred out there in netroots land.
whereas i think reality is, people always had these kinds of issues with our media betters; we simply lacked any way of telling them.
hence: denial.
that, at least, is my current working theory.
And Richard Cohen is supposed to be the house liberal on the WaPo op-ed page. He sounds like a WATB to me.
Dude...why the D&D reference? I blog...and I don't play D&D but I will wax that ASS in some Madden...and I play in my basement on a 52 in Sharp LCD while my fine ASS wife is chilling in the home theater next to me reading Ron Sukind's book! The netroots are the people that post comments too! :))) I am in agreement with the post...I take exception with the image of the netroots...
The eunuchs are willing to be criticized by other eunuchs in the Forbidden City, and can live with the notion that the nobles and royalty whom they serve/manipulate might occasionally get angry at them.
They cannot, however, tolerate being criticized by the peasants. Don't we know our place?
Journalists are as self-interested as anybody else, and the netroots really are putting them out of business. The netroots represent a multi-pronged attack on traditional newspaper journalism in that there is less revenue and newspapers lose their monopoly on information. It's perfectly logical that these people are going to lash out, whether they lean left, right, or center.
Exacerbating the problem is that while losing revenue and readership, newspapers are increasingly trying to play the Murdochian journalistic game, ultimately catering entertainment over news, and further lowering the level of discourse, thus only making the netroots a better source of information when contrasted with traditional news media. Thus, the preexisting problems are simply exacerbated, throwing more fuel on the netroots' fire.
You didn't mention that the douche bag called his progressive critics communists. This guy, like so many of his MSM colleagues, writes on an array of subject matters he knows little of without doing research.
And rather than getting off their asses to do some intelligent work, they portray bloggers as yahoos vandalizing journalism. The biggest MSM joke these days is NBC hiring Russert's frat boy son as a reporter.
I guess they didn't otherwise have any young, studied, ambitious applicants to choose from.
Nothing to do with this post: But, I've been waiting for like two weeks to see your reaction to Toby Keith endorsing Barack Obama. Did I just miss it? Or did you just not post about it?
Richard Cohen's columns are painful to read because he is so breathtakingly stupid and arrogant.
Cohen's All Time Wienie Moment came after Stephen Colbert eviscerated Dumbya at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. Cohen was outraged and actually claimed that Dumbya's little fratboy comedy routine was funnier than Colbert's bit.
I've been told that in person Cohen has bad breath and a perpetual body odor problem.
I'm a journalist, and while I think netroots and bloggers have done a great deal for the discourse in this country (I happen to blog myself), I think it's short-sighted to think they are a "better source of information" or can ultimately replace traditional media.
For one, the reason publications like the Atlantic, New York Times or Washington Post are taken so seriously is because of their editorial integrity and transparency. The newspapers of record are exactly that- the official record. They must stand behind whatever they print and if they make a mistake, they publish corrections or must update the story. Bloggers can do the same, but most don't. That leaves them free to report speculation, omit sourcing or change their posts as they see fit, removing material later found to be untrue without acknowledgement.
In addition, without journalists who investigate, report and interview people, there is nothing for bloggers to write about. Bloggers are all too eager to quote the entire meat of a story without even a link before launching into their thesis, but don't acknowledge that only through the work of that reporter would the issue have even come to light. Most bloggers don't spend years researching stories, building sources and carefully studying the subject they cover.
Of course, many journalists don't either. The best of both worlds do this, but journalists are far more likely to be able to do the legwork. The best bloggers usually write about the world they inhabit; the best journalists can write about any subject they are assigned to cover.
In a perfect world, bloggers and journalists would work together, with the latter doing the leg work and the former helping to highlight those stories and foster a dialogue. I like to think that is what is being accomplished through blogs like this one.
Ultimately, the rise of netroots spells doom for the pundit class and editorial columnists much more than lunch-pail journalists. There will always be a need for someone whose work it is to dig up the truth; whatever they are called, there is always more nuance to the story than any one-sided column or blog post can capture.
In addition, without journalists who investigate, report and interview people, there is nothing for bloggers to write about.
Hasn't it been two years since blogger Josh Marshall won a Peabody award for his investigative reporting on the US Attorneys scandal, which up to then no major newspaper had touched?
I would have thought that would have dispensed with this facile argument that newspapers are the sole source of information for bloggers. Quite frankly, they are being replaced.
Most bloggers don't spend years researching stories, building sources and carefully studying the subject they cover.
To the contrary - it seems like picking up the phone, contacting a source, or doing research into the topic at hand is the kind of thing only bloggers are doing these days. The height was Joe Klein's adamant insistence, during the recent telecom immunity debates, that he had neither the time nor the interest to actually learn about the issue, but that shouldn't be held against him if he wanted to write a column about it.
In a perfect world, bloggers and journalists would work together, with the latter doing the leg work and the former helping to highlight those stories and foster a dialogue.
Here in the real world, what seems to be happening is that "serious" journalists are spending far more time and print justifying their own exalted status as sources - like you've been doing - than they spend actually reporting, leaving regular joe bloggers to pick up the slack. I mean, hell, it's so much easier to just be a steno pad for the Bush administration, right?
spottie, i agree with you that the rise of blogging means the end of overpaid op-ed writers, and not a moment too soon, but otherwsie, i agree with chet: the way for "bloggers" and "journalists" to work together is for journalists to get off their high horse about the exalted nature of their knowledge and sources.
i do think we can draw some distinctions within that overall comment: i think the worst offenders are the so-called "national press corps" types; i think there are many hard-working local news and business news and sports beat reporters who are doing a fine job (or who will, in the future, be reporter/bloggers), but then again, they're not the ones the netroots are sending nasty emails to.
Wasn't Cohen one of those guys who bragged like a decade ago he could be an expert on anything and didn't realize that was because no one would call them on their bullshit? What a joke. He cares more about seeming respectable to other old farts in DC than in accuracy, originality and nuance.