Monday, March 20, 2006

Big Fleas, Little Fleas

It's an A-List cage fight! Oliver Kamm has written an article for the Times basically lamenting that they let anyone in the Blogosphere these days. Blog evangelist Jackie D has struck back by claiming that even if 99% of us are idiots, this technology allows us to combine our stupidity and create a sort of virtual intelligence.

Well, whatever. What chiefly annoyed me was Kamm resurrecting an old charge against the Blogosphere, namely that bloggers are essentially parasitic on the MSM. Sure enough, but isn't there an element of pots & kettles here ? Consider the constant yelping during the last Gulf War that the military weren't fast enough to supply the MSM with up to the minute reports on what every unit was doing. So this is what 150 years of technological advances have done for reporting, from William Howard Russell witnessing the Charge of the Light Brigade, to a barrel load of whiny brats demanding that soldiers drop stories in their lap. Say what you like about bloggers, but at least we don't storm into newspaper officers 30 minutes before deadline and demand the staff open up their archives for us.

The bottom line is that the MSM just doesn't do that much original reporting anyway, not once you factor out the rewritten PR garbage, the space given over to activist whiners and the constant pillaging of the cuttings file. The Martians could land in Sheffield and the MSM wouldn't notice until they issued a press release.

No comments: