Blog Bashing

There’s been quite a bit of blog bashing lately. Scott McLemee scoffed at the notion of a blog implosion last week. Today, my conservative daddy sent me a link to a post from Power Line where they respond to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Joseph Rago. Rago writes,

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

Paul from Power Line points out that bloggers provide useful follow-up analysis of events. He adds,

Rago has also overlooked an increasingly important blog phenomenon — the specialty blog. The example I always use is the confirmation process for John Roberts and Samuel Alito. In Roberts’ case, the MSM did a great job of unearthing old memos he had written on a variety of legal issues. With Alito, the MSM (perhaps with the help of certain interest groups) identified many controversial opinions he had written during lengthy service on the Third Circuit. But when it came to analyzing these materials, the MSM could not compete with blogs like Scotus blog (which is now presented by my law firm) and Bench Memos that are written by law professors, Supreme Court practitioners, former Supreme Court clerks, etc.

Uh, yeah! I wrote a paper on the rise of specialty blogs.

Paul also points out an article by E.J. Dionne on the interplay between media and the blogs. No time to read it now, but I thought I would pass on the link to you all.