Blogs Shmogs! Damned kids and their meddling ways…

Eric Engberg at CBSNews takes the infantile blogosphere to task in a specious display of pseudo-journalism.
By his logic ‘newspapers’ qua newspapers can be judged by sampling the Weekly World News and the Daily Mirror.
All food tastes terrible if we can judge by a British menu, and thus the blogosphere is inherently flawed because Ana Marie Cox is ‘smutty’ and Andrew Sullivan shows ‘hubris.’ I suppose Engberg fashions himself nemesis, though this makes a farce of the old tragic process. Is he all the gods can muster?
Like others who’ve been critical of blogs lately Engberg seems unsure even of what a blog is: the Drudge Report? That’s a news portal. (And a handy one at that — without it I wouldn’t have read Engberg’s piece.)
Here’s a telling bit on election night blogging:

This is the kind of stuff we used to run in my aforementioned school paper, when the speculation surrounded who was going steady. The difference is that the bloggers aspire to being a force in our public life and claim to be at the forefront of a new political-media era. It was clear to me, from following their efforts that night, that, unlike journalists, some blog operators who are quick to trash the MSM not only don?t care about the veracity of the stories they are spreading, they do not understand when there is a live hand grenade on their keyboard. They appear not to care. Their concern is for controversy and “hits.”

First, it’s not the kind of stuff he used to run in his school paper, because as speculative as any of the material is at a given time, blogs are created in real time and updated constantly. That’s one difference. Another is that blogs are not interested in reporting who’s going steady, or in reporting at all: they’re about individuals or groups of individuals commenting on any number of things, from their pets, to their passions, to the state of the world. And blogs often naturally stand as a critique of institutions, the mainstream media included.
Classical Values for example is notionally about the culture war, but like all other blogs it is also about the people writing the posts, their personal invovlement in the subject, and their reaction to the world at large. Governing bodies, outspoken individuals, other blogs, authors of all kinds are fair game for a medium that is at its base a form of commentary.
And Engberg is only showing his ignorance of blogging when he assumes that bloggers aspire to being journalists based on Andrew Sullivan’s irrelevant ramblings. Sullivan himself is as open to critique in the blogosphere as Michael Moore or Dan Rather. This is the second critique of the quoted passage: Engberg presumes to speak of all bloggers as one with a common goal, a common ignorance, and as representing a common danger. That danger is, of course, the danger of a little information.
It takes people like Engberg to filter information for the dirty masses, which is what lies at the base of his empty cry.