Kathleen Parker skittish on blogs

Kathleen Parker is a columnist whose work I occasionally enjoy reading. Today she has a skeptical column on blogs that I think shows her lack of familiarity with the medium, and thus makes blogs a topic she should study up on a little more before she writes on them again. I'm going to take a moment to gently fisk a couple things from her column today.

Say what you will about the so-called mainstream media, but no industry agonizes more about how to improve its product, police its own members and better serve its communities. Newspapers are filled with carpal-tunneled wretches, overworked and underpaid, who suffer near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.

And no industry agonizes more over how to inject their bias while trying to convince their viewers/readers that they are impartial. With blogs, the political leanings are generally put out there up front, and the reader can then interpret the posts with that knowledge in mind. I believe the media types call that transparency, and last time I checked, they liked it.

That a Jayson Blair of The New York Times or a Jack Kelley of USA Today surfaces now and then as a plagiarist or a fabricator ultimately is testament to the high standards tens of thousands of others strive to uphold each day without recognition. Blair and Kelley are infamous, but they're also gone.

Bloggers persist no matter their contributions or quality, though most would have little to occupy their time were the mainstream media to disappear tomorrow. Some bloggers do their own reporting, but most rely on mainstream reporters to do the heavy lifting. Some bloggers also offer superb commentary, but most babble, buzz and blurt like caffeinated adolescents competing for the Ritalin generation's inevitable senior superlative: Most Obsessive-Compulsive.

There is a tendency in blogging for the Jayson Blair and Jack Kelley types to get washed out before their blogs reach the blogging equivalent of the New York Times and the USA Today. Those that don't tend to develop smaller niche audiences of like minded nuts, and there is little that can be done about that. Nuts will always attract nuts. And yes, we bloggers do rely on mainstream reporters much of the time, and I don't think there are many of us out here that truly think that blogs will completely supplant mainstream news reporting. Most of us who blog still have day jobs and families that occupy much of our time. What we do claim though is that we are keeping the main stream media in line after years of dominance which had lead the MSM to sloppiness, arrogance and bias (See Rathergate). And in regards to her claims that most bloggers "babble, buzz and blurt like caffeinated adolescents competing like caffeinated adolescents competing for the Ritalin generation's inevitable senior superlative: Most Obsessive-Compulsive," I just have this to say: Is what you are describing anything like that babbling, buzzing, blurting sentence you just wrote, Ms. Parker? And the correct term is most OCD, ma'am.

Even so, they hold the same megaphone as the adults and enjoy perceived credibility owing to membership in the larger world of blog grown-ups. These effete and often clever baby "bloggies" are rich in time and toys, but bereft of adult supervision. Spoiled and undisciplined, they have grabbed the mike and seized the stage, a privilege granted not by years in the trenches, but by virtue of a three-pronged plug and the miracle of WiFi.

This analogy between bloggers and children is baffling. As Parker gets deeper and deeper into this article, she begins to sound more and more like some blogger out there criticized her and she has taken it very personally.

They play tag team with hyperlinks ("I'll say you're important if you'll say I'm important) and shriek "Gotcha!" when they catch some weary wage earner in a mistake or oversight. Plenty smart but lacking in wisdom, they possess the power of a forum, but neither the maturity nor humility that years of experience impose.

Again, she has very little factual in this sentence, just assertions. Apparently the wisdom Ms. Parker has gained from all of her years in the business gives her license to be condescending and to not cite any facts or examples. If so, I look forward to the day that I'm as wise as her, because wage earners obviously have the right to make mistakes without being called to the carpet on it. Yeah, tell that to my boss and the bosses of all the other bloggers out there.

Each time I wander into blogdom, I'm reminded of the savage children stranded on an island in William Golding's "Lord of the Flies." Without adult supervision, they organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians in the absence of a civilizing structure.

Again with this children thing, and no examples. Last time I checked, most bloggers are responsible adults, and none have reverted to creatures of the stone age. Many Kos readers may revert to their stoned teenage years, but even that is a far cry from what Parker is describing :-).

What Golding demonstrated - and what we're witnessing as the Blogosphere's offspring multiply - is that people tend to abuse power when it is unearned and will bring down others to enhance themselves. Likewise, many bloggers seek the destruction of others for their own self-aggrandizement. When a mainstream journalist stumbles, they pile on like so many savages, hoisting his or her head on a bloody stick as Golding's children did the fly-covered head of a butchered sow.

Amusing. And reporters don't tend to abuse power? They don't seek to bring down others for their own self-aggrandizement? Parker needs to review her journalism history. And journalists and bloggers alike get skewered by the blogs when they screw up a story. The journalists get more arrows though because they still have the mantle of America's news providers, not bloggers. If Instapundit went out and badly flubbed a story, he'd not only take as many arrows from the blogosphere as any reporter, the MSM would take the opportunity to tar and feather him and the entire blogosphere, just like we bloggers do to reporters and major news outlets who screw up badly.

Schadenfreude - pleasure in others' misfortunes - has become the new barbarity on an island called Blog. When someone trips, whether Dan Rather or Eason Jordan or Judith Miller, bloggers are the bloodthirsty masses slavering for a public flogging. Incivility is their weapon and humanity their victim.

I refer to my previous post on the NBC Nightly News story on profiting on others misery. Ms. Parker is like everyone else in this business-she too is benefiting and taking pleasure from the misfortune of others, only in her case it is over non-journalist types. And she is grossly misrepresenting Dan Rather in particular. His sin was not a "trip", it was a willful misrepresentation, something I thought the fine trade of journalism abhorred. I guess not.

I mean no disrespect to the many brilliant people out there - professors, lawyers, doctors, philosophers, scientists and other journalists who also happen to blog. Again, they know who they are. But we should beware and resist the rest of the ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction.

We can't silence them, but for civilization's sake - and the integrity of information by which we all live or die - we can and should ignore them.

Ah, you brilliant people out there. She does mean you if you've ever criticized her. And by ignoring blogs, you benefit her directly, because there is no one left to call her out when she writes something dumb and childish-like this column.

In fisking Ms. Parker, I am not claiming that blogs are anywhere near perfect because they aren't. Ms. Parker delved into something I don't believe she understands very well, though, and she made her self look an arrogant, immature, snide member of the media establishment. She needed to be called on it. I'm going to go back to playing with my Legos now, and maybe later I'll participate in a wilding.