The Death Rattle of the Mainstream Media

OpinionJournal has an amazing piece today written by the assistant editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal. It's called "The Blog Mob", but could probably be more correctly titled "I'm Arrogant and Condescending and Now I'll Tell You Why". The author, Mr. Joseph Rago, proceeds to spend many paragraphs calling blog writers fools and blog readers imbeciles. Why? Because bloggers can contribute to the national discourse, for good or bad, without having first to clear their items with editors like him. That really bugs the mainstream pressies who find their influence dwindling as the dead tree media fades, while more and more people get their news and information from online sources.

Cartoonist Chris Muir has already lampooned the piece in his online cartoon Day by Day, and before the end of the day, I predict that Mr. Rago's work will have been skeletonized much like a cow in a pool of piranhas. It's so pretentious that it reads more like something you'd expect from the Huffington Post than a piece written by an editor at the Wall Street Journal. I think Mr. Rago has a future as a blogger.

This paragraph caught my attention:

Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line. Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions--John Kerry always providing useful material--while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq.

I found that highlighted comment especially entertaining, coming just one day after Mr. Rago's esteemed journalistic colleagues in the White House press corps went into spasms of disbelief because they weren't the first ones to know about Mrs. Bush's skin cancer lesion. Was that a "second-order distraction" or a "fundamental issue"?

I wonder if Mr. Rago ever considered the impact of blogs on the spread of news and articles published by his own paper? Many bloggers regularly link to pieces at OpinionJournal or the Wall Street Journal, and many people read those articles only because some blogger posted an excerpt or a link. Would he rather we just ignore his publication altogether?

I'll be interested to see if James Taranto writes anything about this piece. He writes Best of the Web Today at OpinionJournal.com, an online column much like the blogs that Mr. Rago dislikes so much. It usually comes out around midday so we'll see what he has to say.

Meanwhile, if you must, you can read Mr. Rago's blogworthy rant here.

UPDATE: Iowahawk checks in with a copy of Mr. Rago's first draft.