[Crossposted from www.hiramhover.typepad.com]
Christopher Simpson--the PR consultant who worries that bloggers are "rampant" in universities and pose a threat akin to terrorism--isn't the only one with bloggers on the brain.
Adam Cohen, a member of the NYT editorial board, offers up The Latest Rumbling in the Blogosphere: Questions About Ethics. Cohen retreads several tired arguments about bloggers' supposed lack of ethics and their relation to the mainstream media, as DemFromCT effectively dissects over at The Next Hurrah.
Follow me to the flip for the latest from the ever-charming Howard Kurtz in the WaPo.
Says Howie:
The essence of blogging has been the one-man band, the big mouth in the basement, the pajama-clad pontificator taking on the media establishment.
Now Arianna Huffington, who knows something about seizing the spotlight, wants to change that. Today she launches a 300-person blog, the Huffington Post, featuring lots of her famous showbiz friends, that could redefine the nature of online commentary, or at least bring her another 15 minutes.
...
"The great thing about blogging is that your thoughts don't have to have a beginning, middle and end," says Huffington, arguing that famous folks are usually too busy to craft an op-ed piece. "You can just put a thought out there in the cultural bloodstream."
I guess that counts as a two-fer three-fer: Howie disses bloggers, Huffington, and her "famous showbiz friends" all in short order.
As a media reporter, Kurtz clearly feels more than a little threatened by what he regards as the challenge of a new medium. More and more, his response seems like that of a holier-than-thou crusader against sex and porn: under cover of loud protestations of disgust, he indulges his fascination with the thing he claims to loathe.