Tuesday, July 12, 2011

The Self-Congratulatory Smugness of Internet Culture

Well, I find myself reading over at RAWMUSCLEGLUTES more often than normal, and it turns out there's a change of pace today: Jonathan Rauch, the author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, is blogging at Sully's. See: "Blogging: The Rules." He doesn't like blogs and blog ethics. And he's grumpy. But this is catchy:
Am I whining? Sure. But I submit that the whining of traditional journalists (you know, the kind of people who punched their tickets on newspaper police beats where they learned quaint notions of fairness and accuracy and keeping one's opinions out of it and all that) is nothing compared to the self-congratulatory smugness of internet culture, which tells us at least five times before breakfast that it is the Great New Thing.
Rauch argues blogging's glory days are done. Perhaps. But as I've discussed recently, it's really old media that bitten the dust. We'll have some kind of new media, blogs or something else, and citizens will drive an increasing portion of what's news, and they'll keep the establishment more honest than ever before. I like it.

RELATED: From Belladonna Rogers, "The Unbearable Smugness of Liberals: A Guide for the Perplexed."

2 comments:

Dennis said...

This person must be living in fantasy land if he wants to believe that "so called" journalists kept their biases out of their articles. A large number of paper's names are indicative of their political bent. Journalists have been taking sides since the beginning of journalism. The NYTimes, The LATimes, et al have always had a bias. This person needs to grow up and read some history before he makes such assertions.
What he dislikes is the fact that the Internet is taking away his "stick" and his power to deceive and dissemble.

Dennis said...

James T. Callender as an example of the unbiased journalism of the past..