See, now there's a title you wouldn't get away with in the traditional media (because it's so petty), and yet which lends such refreshing charm and wonderment to the blogosphere!
Just a quick, late night note to observe that Josh Marshall has commented on the Michael Skube piece from earlier today, and that sparked an exchange that's easily as surprising as the foolishness of Skube's dismissal of the blogosphere. Skube, you may recall from the article, wrote:
"No man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, "ever wrote but for money." Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post -- are insistent partisans in political debate.
Now, it struck me that to the best of my knowledge, none of the named bloggers actually, you know, write for free. Yes, I can practically smell the "time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance."
But here's the curious part:
Now, whether we do any quality reporting at TPM is a matter of opinion. And everyone is entitled to theirs. So against my better judgment, I sent Skube an email telling him that I found it hard to believe he was very familiar with TPM if he was including us as examples in a column about the dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere.
Now, I get criticized plenty. And that's fair since I do plenty of criticizing. And I wouldn't raise any of this here if it weren't for what came up in Skube's response.
Not long after I wrote I got a reply: "I didn't put your name into the piece and haven't spent any time on your site. So to that extent I'm happy to give you benefit of the doubt ..."
This seemed more than a little odd since, as I said, he certainly does use me as an example -- along with Sullivan, Matt Yglesias and Kos. So I followed up noting my surprise that he didn't seem to remember what he'd written in his own opinion column on the very day it appeared and that in any case it cut against his credibility somewhat that he wrote about sites he admits he'd never read.
To which I got this response: "I said I did not refer to you in the original. Your name was inserted late by an editor who perhaps thought I needed to cite more examples ... "
Josh goes on to note how silly it seems for a professor of journalism to have given an editor carte blanche to toss in examples like that. Doubly so in that they're factually incorrect.
Actually, if you look at what he says, it seems Skube's editor at the Times oped page didn't think he had enough specific examples in his article decrying our culture of free-wheeling assertion bereft of factual backing. Or perhaps any examples. So the editor came up with a few blogs to mention and Skube signed off. And Skube was happy to sign off on the addition even though he didn't know anything about them.
But here's what strikes me about what Josh says. The Grand Inquisitor of Serious Journalism deigned to speak to us about the evils of the blogosphere but... had no examples in his article? Or at least, not enough to satisfy his editors?
And this is the great advantage of Serious Journalism? That it has an editing, vetting and fact checking process?
And this is what it produces? A list that the author does not edit, vet or fact check, because a "professional" is taking care of that?
I ask you, did Michael Skube's exposition of the virtues of Serious Journalism produce the results promised? He'd have been far better served simply blogging it.
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