The Enlightened Despot

When they’re right, they’re right:

Mainstream Media At It Again, Bloggers Report

NEW YORK—The mainstream media—a loose consortium of corporate news outlets known for using professionally trained journalists who adhere to an editorial process—have once again completely missed the boat in their reporting of national events, outraged sources within the blogosphere said Monday. “When will the MSM dinosaurs realize that they’re TOTALLY irrelevant?” wrote 39-year-old part-time librarian James Last, commenting on coverage of Obama’s first 100 days in a scathing post that appeared on his blog, The LAST Word. “If the idiots at MSNBC, The New York Times, and WaPo could lift their heads from the money trough for a minute, maybe they’d write a story that’s not completely driven by the corporate agenda. I’m not holding my breath.” Right-wing bloggers were reportedly equally upset, with many singling out MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as “shills” for the liberal agenda. At press time, an estimated 8.4 million bloggers nationwide were watching CNN

It seems that almost everyone thinks they need to post some 9/11 thoughts today (I’m not goingt to link to any of it). I disagree. I don’t, of course, object to people sharing their feelings about it if that’s what they want to do, but the way much of it is executed. This, for example, comes after a long list of sentences beginning with “God bless ____”:

Let us never forget that there is, in fact, a global war being waged against us by terrorist extremists who wish to destroy this country and its values of freedom and democracy, a country that remains a beacon of shining light to the rest of the world. We must win this war.

I think anyone who thinks that all of that is true should forget it immediately, because they are in error. But many bloggers - for and against the war - seem to think that this is a good time to pray publicly, then slip in a moral of the story, using the tragedy as leverage. Pass.

Today it seems that hostilities have finally been called off in the recent war between Yglesias, Ambinder, and Greenwald over the responsibilities of the press. A rough recap:

Ambinder: The public doesn’t seem to care that McCain is lying about Palin and the bridge.
Yglesias: That’s because you and your buddies in the media aren’t doing your duty and calling him on it, jerk!
Ambinder: Talking about ‘the duty of the press’ is for pretentious people like Greenwald.
Greenwald: Oh no you didn’t! [a bunch of pretentious rambling].
Yglesias: Worrying about the press’s duties is beneath someone who is a member of the press? Really?

This immediately got me thinking of analogies. At first, it seemed clear to me that Greenwald was Wyclef, senselessly drawn into beef by Cannibus (Ambinder) who in turn had been attacked without real provocation by LL Cool J (Yglesias). Once I read through Greenwald’s predictable attempt to broaden the issue into overall ethical theories, I couldn’t help but look at it in that light: Greenwald set himself up as a Kantian, pegging Ambinder as a hedonist and Yglesias as a somewhat more sophisticated egoist, and did his best (which wasn’t really all that great) to show why those positions are untenable.

A quick scoring of the fight: Yglesias is right that journalists should tell the truth and point out when the people they report on are lying, but Ambinder is right that having long discussions about whether journalists have some special set of moral obligations to their public is tedious, and best left to Greenwald. After all, it’s much more important to actually behave ethically, than to have a neat theory on what constitutes ethical behavior. Greenwald is right that he can produce very lengthy posts.

More interesting than any of that, though, is this from Yglesias:

So where’s the narrative about how McCain’s key strategy introducing Sarah Palin to the public and turning his campaign around is based on putting lies at the heart of the presentation? There are a few dozen people, of whom Marc is one, in a position to create this narrative. They’ve chosen not to do so, but that’s a decision they’ve made not a fact about “the way consumers process news.”

Now, I have nothing but respect for Ambinder. He’s a great source of information. But he is, at the end of the day, a fat nerd in front of a computer. It might be nice for Yglesias, as a fat nerd in front of a computer, to imagine that other fat nerds in front of computers are deciding who becomes our next president, but I see no evidence that this is the case. Ambinder doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. While he might be a source and an advisor for a lot of people who are important in the media, that is no reason to think that he has any influence whatsoever on how they choose to present their stories.

Consider this goofy crew from The Corner, a rabble that call themselves ‘Red Meat’.   All of them are very fat and silly.  Ramesh Ponnuru is a fat little Indian dumpling and his voice is a ridiculous helium soprano.   To his right is Jim Geraghty, whose subtle lisp, exaggerated body language, and camp humor suggest a disconnect between his political beliefs and personal practice.  Stephen Spruiell probably wears that press badge to bed.  And the fattest of the lot is the nauseating Mark Hemingway, who mostly sits in froglike quiet but from time to time blurts out a disastrous one liner, stunning even the other jerks into an uncomfortable silence.  The four are without charisma.  If you watched the clip without sound you would probably guess they were playing Dungeons & Dragons, but without dice - because their game is more about the character development than killing trolls.

I think an analogy would be helpful here:

liberal blogosphere : panic   ::    fat kid : cake

h/t 50 Cent