The NYT take on blogs

Lileks:

...

But I did want to say something about that silly NYT piece about blogging. All I needed to know I learned from the cover. Doing a story on blogging and putting Wonkette on the cover is like using Janine Garafalo to illustrate a story about the power of talk radio. Sure, Limbaugh has better numbers, but what’s more compelling? A story about someone who attracts 20 million uninteresting people, or someone who attracts 100,000 people who are Just Like Us?

This paragraph was amusing:

Earlier this month, a platoon of right-wing bloggers launched a coordinated assault against CBS News and its memos claiming that President Bush got special treatment in the National Guard; within 24 hours, the bloggers' obsessive study of typefaces in the 1970's migrated onto Drudge, then onto Fox News and then onto the networks and the front pages of the country's leading newspapers.

“Coordinated” is a rather lazy choice of words, if the author means “some people sent emails to other people, and they all worked loosely together.” If that’s coordination, then your average freeway, full of people driving alongside and occasionally signaling their turns, is a massive conspiracy. But he didn’t mean that, I don’t think – it was a coordinated assault! Designed to turn our eyes away from the truth the memos implied and make us stare, like Alex in the chair in Clockwork Orange, at the fonts and superscripts and other misleading minutae. It’s amusing to learn that the author interviewed Charles for 45 minutes, and declined to sully his article with any quotes from the fellow who helped disprove the memo. It’s like writing a story about the Enigma decrypts and spending most of your time on a fashion critic who wrote bitchy assessments of the clothing worn by the women who typed in the intel.

The article contented itself with lauding the contributions of lefty bloggers; should Kerry lose, this will provide the MSM with the rationale for concluding that blogging is passé and ineffectual, or that lefty bloggers cannot match the Coordinated Forces of the Dark Side, the million monkeys clattering out the dictates of Lord Rove in the hopes they can hit POST before he uses his dreaded Choking Gesture to teach the slackers a lesson.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more