According to Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal, if you are one who writes blogs, you are a fool. If that is not bad enough, if you read them, you are an imbecile. What would you rather be$%: Unfortunately, I guess I am both, because I am guilty of both. I find this interesting coming from a publication that is still trying to sell content that people can get for free else where. Ideologically, I agree with the editorial pages of the Journal on most economic and political issues, but they completely underestimate the power of the Web. Then again, virtually every traditional publication is guilty of this short sightedness. Or is it wishful thinking, similar to what canal boat owners had about trains and trains had about planes (hoping the web is just a fad)$%:
Rago paints with a broad brush, attacking blogs in general at will and his criticisms seem to cross ideological lines. He generally (and it appears, genuinely) dislikes blogs as a media, although the Wall Street Journal has blogs of their own. Rago is right, to a point, there certainly are numerous blogs that are not worth the space. This was pointed out very clearly in David A. Utter's piece at Webpronews.com (an excellent article). Rago's basic premise is that the blogs are largely made up of unaccountable individuals, with insufficient skills, and significant axes to grind. This is a dangerous formula in the eyes of the media elite.
But is that not the case with all media$%: Some media is excellent and other sources are disastrous and there are many more that falls in between. Was there excellence and quality control in content when Dan Rather was involved in a fabricated story on the President's military service record$%: Or was it responsible when CNN showed film footage of terrorists killing US troops$%: And each year there is list after list of stories about irresponsible journalism made up of plagiarisms or even lies. I doubt anyone will soon forget the exploits of Jayson Blair, the young man who devastated the credibility (with accusations against him of plagiarism and falsehoods) of one of the largest circulated and most respected newspapers in the country, The New York Times. The point$%: All media -- institutional and popular -- are vulnerable to irresponsible behavior. No media, including print, is in any position to look down its nose at others.
The difference is, most people take the institutional media quite seriously and popular media (such as blogs) with a grain of salt. Because of this, I actually believe blogs are "safer," since people often take the statements of institutional media as "gospel." The reason it is easy to take pot shots at popular media is because there is so much of it and there are virtually no institutional mechanisms to keep them accountable (for example, editors, lawyers, advertisers, etc.). The lesson I learn is that I need to be careful in what I read and to weigh the credibility of the content and the writer very seriously. That is a lesson I learned long before I ever heard the word, "blog."
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