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Excuse me, bloggers? Can I have a moment of your time? I know you’re busy and everything — that “Daily Show” segment last night was pretty awesome — but I’m trying to figure something out. I’ve scrolled through hundreds of posts today, and there seems to be one thing the left and right agree on: If someone affiliated with an established media outlet writes or says something, it’s probably not worth listening to. Why? Because they’re a “mainstream media apologist.” They’re just trying to protect themselves, to stand up for the system. They’re quivering wimps, really, clinging to their dwindling livelihoods. Who are they to disagree with a blogger?
Here’s what I don’t get, though. Bloggers don’t like when members of the media dismiss their arguments simply because they’re bloggers, and rightly so. But they’re perfectly happy to dismiss the arguments of media folks simply because they’re media folks. Doesn’t that stance kind of reek of Gannon/Guckertesque hypocrisy? Seems to me that we should treat the arguments from bloggers and media people in exactly the same way — when they’re dumb, we call them dumb, when they’re smart, we call them smart. Let’s judge content, not platform.
Anyway, no matter: As PoliPundit points out, bloggers are hot. So why worry, right? (More info from PoliPundit: According to the t-shirt pictured in the ad on the right side of the site, “Commies Aren’t Cool.”) It’s not that bloggers are hot in a WB hour-long drama kind of way — though, we gotta say, Ezra’s looking pretty fly with that open shirt — but in more of a “Bigger than Jesus” sense. Just this week, they’ve been featured on Charlie Rose and Jon Stewart. And Peggy Noonan loves them! “What next?,” wonders PoliPundit. “Will we see little Wonkette and Instapundit action figures? … Ann Coulter and Dennis Miller have their own dolls, so why not?”
And if it happens, we’ve got to wonder: With Barbie and Ken now “just friends”, might Malibu Glenn Reynolds make his move?
Moving on (grudgingly) from blogger action-figure love-life speculation: Thanks to a credit reporting company called ChoicePoint, you’ll be happy to learn that you might be at high risk for identity theft. ChoicePoint said Tuesday that hackers had broken into its database and stolen personal information about customers. More than 100,000 people are at risk, but ChoicePoint won’t say who they are in states other than California, since the laws in those other states don’t require them to. “Remember this the next time some corporate lobbying group whines about excessive regulation,” writes Kevin Drum. But wait, there’s more: As Jason Levine (a.k.a. Queso) points out, it wasn’t hackers at all who were responsible for the information getting out, but ChoicePoint itself. Criminals created fake businesses and set up accounts with ChoicePoint, which handed the information over to them.
“Notice the difference?” writes Levine. “If it’s reported that nefarious hackers broke into ChoicePoint and stole the data, then ChoicePoint comes out looking like a victim. On the other hand, if it’s reported that the failure was in ChoicePoint’s internal mechanisms for verifying the validity of an account application, the existence of the company behind that application, and the right of that company to obtain credit information, then ChoicePoint is revealed as a remarkably large part of the problem.” Thus far, he says, only MSNBC is reporting the story correctly.
Finally, Oliver Willis wants to put another scalp on the Blog Wall of Shame by getting Brit Hume off the air. He’s even put together a fancy banner. On February 3, Hume manipulated the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to make it seem like FDR supported privatizing Social Security. (FDR’s grandson called it “an outrageous distortion.”) “To intentionally twist the words of the father of Social Security in order to support a political plan to destroy it is disgusting,” writes Willis. “Hume has offered no apology nor explanation for his intentional deception. For this fraudulent act, Hume should resign.”
Alas, unless Hume’s past is more interesting than we imagine, he’s probably not too worried. Dishonest journalism without a sex angle holds the public attention about as long as a murder trial without a celebrity. A crime may have been committed, but good luck getting too many people to care.
–Brian Montopoli
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