Entries associated with the tag "Blogs":

Bloggers who aren't navel gazers are supposed to be up to the millisecond, but it just ain't so. Strange Maps just put up a five-year-old map of how different states do in setting standards for teaching evolution, lifted from a May 2002 antievolution Web site, which lifted it from the March 2002 issue of Scientific American (text available here).

I liked the old map, because it was in color, it had funny comments, and it allowed for piquant observations about Indiana's doing a much better job than Illinois (at least in statewide standards -- what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom). But the author of all this information -- Laurence S. Lerner, a University of Chicago alum and an emeritus prof at California State University, Long Beach -- hasn't stopped tracking the subject. A year ago January he published an update in Freethought Today on state science standards in general (Illinois scored a B, Indiana an A, 15 states got Fs) and evolution standards in particular (Illinois and Indiana both scored well; the worst states include Wisconsin, Mississippi, and Connecticut). The associated map is in shades of gray.

And Lerner's accompany article is fun as well as informative. He writes, "As creationism has evolved under the selective pressure of a series of court decisions ..."

Ed Brayton at Positive Liberty takes up the cause of Egyptian blogger Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman, now sentenced to a total of four years in prison for "insulting Islam" and "defaming the president of Egypt." The Cato Institute's Tom Palmer and Raja Kamal of the University of Chicago Harris School publicized his plight in the February 21 Washington Post. More at Free Kareem!

Brayton adds an important point in case this gets you all self-righteous. If you think it's wrong to lock up a blogger for slagging a religion, but you also think it's OK to outlaw "hate speech" or speech denying that the Holocaust happened, then you've got a whole lot of explaining to do.

While today's Chicago Tribune covers presidential candidates' fund-raisers, the blogosphere has been all over  the story of two well-known feminist bloggers being hired by the John Edwards campaign, then fired, then quickly rehired. They're Chicago-area blogger Melissa McEwan, aka Shakespeare's Sister, and Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte. Short version: a potty-mouthed conservative Catholic called them potty mouths.

If you want the details, here's what William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said they said. Here's a sample of Donohue's own output. And here are the statements from Edwards and the two bloggers. Salon's Alex Koppelman and Rebecca Traister have been on the case.

I've quoted Pandagon and Shakespeare's Sister here before. I think they're right on the issues and Donohue's wrong. Like Edwards, I'm not always comfortable with their language, but then again it's not my uterus that Donohue wants the government to regulate according to his sectarian beliefs.

Media Matters documents the noncoverage of a similar situation involving John McCain and a right-wing blogger who not only engaged in what Donohue now wants to call hate speech but didn't disclose that McCain had employed him. And you may recall the vice president of the United States dropping the F-bomb on a colleague on the Senate floor.

Some distinctions may be in order:

Is there a difference, at least in degree, between offensive language and bigoted language? Marcotte's explicit physical description of the Immaculate Conception strikes me as offensive, but it's not as if she called Catholicism a gutter religion. Similarly, calling Al Sharpton a liar isn't racist; calling him something using the N word would be. 

Political positions get rougher treatment than religious ones in the public square. If the Catholic Church merely denied its members the right to choose abortion and encouraged others not to choose it and prayed for the practice to end, then its position on abortion wouldn't be attacked in the same way -- and if it were, that would be inappropriate. But a large number of Catholics, including the hierarchy, want the government to forbid anyone to choose an abortion. That's a political position and a theocratic one. It deserves rough handling, and that rough handling isn't bigotry -- it's fair play. If Donohue can't stand the heat he should get out of the kitchen. The excellent Glenn Greenwald says this well and a good deal more. (I should add that the same principle applies to official church positions I agree with, such as opposition to the Iraq fiasco.)

The also excellent Archpundit points out that this episode doesn't speak well for the Edwards campaign's savvy. Yes, John Edwards didn't roll over for right-wing critics, but he obviously wasn't prepared for them either. Now that candidates need blogger help, they're going to have to be ready to deal with the fact that bloggers spill their guts every day in every way -- and not always in ways that will attract the kind of voters who make up their minds at the last minute based on casual impressions.

Greenwald thinks this episode is over, but it's not. Today, Donohue says, "I have developed a game plan that will keep this issue afloat for the remainder of the year." Would it be bigoted to call that rounding up a lynch mob?

Riverbend, a "girl blog from Iraq," lists nine ways to tell if your country's in trouble, starting with "the UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI," and  "the abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country."  (Hat tip to Sam Smith's Progressive Review.)

Gristmill lists the ten most bizarre environmental events of 2006, including, "When Chevy offered net surfers the opportunity to edit their own Chevy Tahoe ads online, enviros grabbed the opportunity to match slick, soaring shots of SUVs rolling over mountainous terrain with titles like 'Gas Guzzler!'" Joel Makower has a more sober list, on which Wal-Mart's green makeover ranks #1.  [CORRECTION FROM COMMENTS:  Wal-Mart was one of ten; the list was not prioritized.]

Dan Gilmoor at the Center for Citizen Media makes ten predictions about blogging and journalism in 2007, in the form of a multiple-choice quiz. For instance, "5. Most newspaper executives will: A. Continue to downsize their newsrooms without any real plan for the long term. B. Complain incessantly about competition from online advertising competitors. C. Remain suspicious of citizen media except as a possible way to save money. D. Innovate at the edges, not in the core functions."

At Guardian Unlimited Tim Radford lists the 11 most interesting science books coming out in the next few months. Best title:  How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take to Change a Planet? Best synopsis: the book about various "gloriously implausible but not necessarily impossible ideas ... including, of course, the proposition that we will all be reassembled as cyber-identities in a cosmic computer and experience a subjective eternity in the last crushing seconds of time." See ya there. (Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels.)

Dean Baker at Beat the Press offers ten resolutions for writers on economics, for instance: "Unless a reporter can identify the cause of a run-up in stock prices, he/she cannot say whether it indicates good news for the economy as a whole. Therefore, it should not be reported as good news."

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate ranks the ten most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006. Guantanamo was only #9. Be afraid, speak out anyway, and don't forget the ACLU.

"The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced," writes Joseph Rago, assistant assistant editorial features editor at the Wall Street Journal at Opinion Journal, "and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness."

Blog journalism, on the other hand, "appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form.... Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought -- instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition."

Overgeneralized twaddle like this is nothing new, and substituting ideology for cognition is what most people do most of the time in any medium available.  But it's especially instructive to hear it from a publication that has just published ten articles on "Poverty: The Search for New Solutions", in which race is mentioned, very briefly, just twice.

If this doesn't immediately warm your heart, you are not a geek. Jennifer Ouelette of Cocktail Party Physics on why she's engaged to fellow blogger Sean Carroll: "Let's just say that the man has his very own bag of plush plagues, stuffed toys that represent the biblical ten plagues of Egypt."

The media's wild ride continues: "It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the [Thomas] Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for. " Read the whole thing by Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic (brief ad viewing required; hat tip to Kiki).

Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren analyzes General Social Survey data and finds a trend among less sophisticated, or less scrupulous, conservatives: "Those who express less tolerance for unpopular groups tend to favor income redistribution and oppose capitalism."  Abstract here, discussion here.

Last rites for VHS, performed by Ed Darrell at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, who learned of the death from Variety. The Dead Media Project saw it coming. 

Do you hate apostrpophe mis'use more than fingernails on a blackboard, but can't stop seeing it? Then you'll "enjoy" this collection at Give, Get, Take, and Have (via Boing Boing), which also showcases misspellings and "quotation mark" abuse.

Football maps showing which NFL game is on where, and why, here. (Hat tip to The Map Room.)

Keith Olbermann tells the truth about the liars running this country (print or video, you decide).

It's official: "Hallways and office doors are not 'free-speech zones'" at Marquette University, at least if you're a libertarian TA with the gall to quote humorist Dave Barry. Some discussion here.

I don't hang my clothes out to dry, but I sure wouldn't want to live somewhere I couldn't.

Wal-Mart's fake blog exposed here and discussed here. Warning: these people take PR seriously.

Amanda Marcotte hates rapists, not men.  So if you call her a "man-hater," what are you saying about men?

Admit it: all your life you've wanted to be able to type a sentence and have it instantly illustrated by images from Flickr. (Hat tip to The Generator Blog.)

If not, then you've undoubtedly been dying to read a 42-page article (PDF) on the uses and misuses of popular song lyrics in legal writing (Bob Dylan rules), including our own 7th Circuit Court of Appeals' footnote quoting Ludacris in order to clarify the distinction between "hoe" and "ho."

• Kevin of CTA Tattler rode north from Chicago and State on the red line: "There were 21 people in the 34 square feet of space (4.5 feet x 7.5 feet) area between the doors. That is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. I counted the people and then paced off the area after the crowd thinned. One woman just screamed out in frustration: 'Oh good lord! If I'm touching you where I shouldn't be I apologize in advance.'"

• Archpundit thinks Eric Zorn needs an editor to remind him where he's from--and that the Green Party needs to stand for something besides causing Republicans to be elected. (OK, that last clause was me, not Arch.  But good grief, first Nader campaigns in swing states and hands it to Bush in 2000, and this year the Greenie in Pennsylvania takes gobs of Santorum money. Thanks for nothing, y'all.)

• David Nirenberg of the University of Chicago, writing at the New Republic online adds needed context to Pope Benedict's September 12 speech that provoked a number of Muslims to violence. (Don't get all technical on me about whether it's a blog; it's online and it has comments, though not enough links.) The Pope's key idea, writes Nirenberg, is that only Catholicism unites faith and reason; Islam, Judaism, and at least some strains of Protestantism overdo the faith part and worship a deity unconstrained by reason. Nirenberg concludes that the Pope was inviting Muslims not to dialogue, but to conversion. (Several commenters disagree vigorously but intelligently--how can you have a dialogue with someone who has no regard for reason at all?)

• What may be the best television show ever aired gets a good going-over by Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James at Slate. (Hat tip to Whet Moser.)  Money quote: "I have repeatedly discovered as a documentary filmmaker what you, Alex, so brilliantly captured in There Are No Children Here: There's no substitute for putting in the time it takes to really get past seeing people as mere symbols—be they symbols of good or bad, or the powerful or desperate. This is what David Simon and his team have done now for four years."

• If you thought all the trouble was just on your CTA rail line, learn the depressing truth (and the number of energetic activists laying it out) at Scott Gordon's place in the Beachwood Reporter. Money quote: "We can't quantify any of the aforementioned problems. The CTA has released some specific data about slow zones and how long it takes certain lines to go around the Loop, but so far has not released much in the way of empirical data that tells us how specific train lines and bus routes are performing. (The CTA just waits for the Campaign for Better Transit to release its own independent reports and then dispatches its flaks to dismiss them.)"

• Mike Klonsky at Small Talk on a study in which Cornell researchers were shocked--shocked!--to find that students average only 16 minutes of activity per physical education class: "Well, duh! Didn't these researchers ever go to high school? . . . But seriously, is gym any different from other traditional high school classes, which are usually about 45-50 minutes long and where, after taking roll and getting things 'on task' they're lucky if there's 16 minutes where students are really engaged?"

• The So-Called Austin Mayor doesn't talk as much as I do, but when he does he makes it count. Here he impeaches the supposed integrity of retiring suburban rep Henry Hyde, without even getting into that gentleman's walloping double standard on the subject of presidential impeachment.

• Jessa Crispin at Bookslut will never have to read the New Yorker again, thanks to haiku! Who would've thunk it?

• Alexander Russo's District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog is fast becoming to CPS what Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and Illinoize are to politics--sources of both information and intelligent discussion from many viewpoints. Victor at Chicago Teachers Speak Out rescues the following from a number of insightful comments responding to CPS's Peter Cunningham, who was invited to make a statement on college-graduation data. The anonymous commenter asks, "Why free a group of schools from bureaucratic oversight? If that oversight is harmful, free all schools. If it is supportive, don't 'free' any. If it is harmful, change it. It's like Cunningham is saying, 'we not imposing our stupid rules and regs on everyone, just the bad schools.'"

• Steve Rhodes at Beachwood Reporter explains in painstaking detail why the Sun-Times's coverage of Daley's Olympic brainstorm would get an F in any reputable J-school. 

Expect to see some vitriolic right-wing reviews of Jacob Hacker's new book, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement--and How You Can Fight Back. In it, he takes a hammer to the pretensions of the "Personal Responsibility Crusade." 

But don't waste your time with the wingers. For useful criticism, go to the good stuff--in this case, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, who gives the book a terse, rhetoric-free going over, pointing out where he thinks Hacker is right (income variability, pensions) and where he overlooked relevant data or failed to prove his case (families, savings), and linking to relevant papers. Most noteworthy is the latest information on job tenure from Ann Huff Stevens of the University of California, Davis: "In 1969, average tenure in the longest job for males aged 58-62 was 21.9 years. In 2002, the comparable figure was 21.4 years."

I learn plenty from economists and those who follow their work  But I try not to waste much time on those who pile on the adjectives or who rely on less than optimal sources in other disciplines. Cowen's a keeper.

When like-minded people sit down and talk things out, they become more like-minded and less tolerant.

That's what David Schkade (University of California--San Diego), Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago), and Reid Hastie (University of Chicago) found out when they conducted a seemingly innocuous experiment in Colorado:

"Groups [of five members each] from Boulder, a predominantly liberal city, met and discussed global warming, affirmative action, and civil unions for same-sex couples; groups from Colorado Springs, a predominately conservative city, met to discuss the same issues. The major effect of deliberation was to make group members more extreme than they were when they started talk." Conservatives became more conservative, liberals more liberal.

As people increasingly are able to sort themselves into places where they feel comfortable--both physically and virtually--this isn't happy news. In the blogosphere, where physical and economic constraints are minimal, the most popular blogs seem to be the most partisan. How many people have both Michelle Malkin and Glenn Greenwald on their blogrolls?

Read all about it at "What Happened on Deliberation Day?" (PDF)

• Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy puts his last nickel into a rigged slot machine when he calls the following item from Time magazine "intriguing": "Previewing the final quarter of Bush's presidency, [administration] officials disclosed to Time that the administration is formulating a huge energy initiative designed to 'change the whole nature of the discussion' and challenge the G.O.P., Democrats, the oil and electricity industries, and environmentalists. An adviser said Bush's views about global warming have evolved. 'Only Nixon could go to China, and only Bush and Cheney--two oilmen--can bring all these parties kicking and screaming to the table,' the adviser said." For pity's sake, just admit the guy is a loser and go home. He hasn't evolved since the Devonian Era. Besides, you'd need an extra universe full of electrons to list all the Nixon-goes-to-China moments Bush has blown.

• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution nails Blurb.com, a self-publishing enterprise soliciting vain bloggers to compile their posts into books: "Translating good blog ideas into book format is best done by people who . . . have experience writing books, or who have journalistic experience, not by people who have large staplers."

• Brendan Nyhan's mental health is better for not knowing that the Chicago Tribune still uses ink on Charles Krauthammer. Here Nyhan finds that Krauthammer has invoked not merely the Munich analogy but the exact same quotation with regard to China in 1989, North Korea in 1994, Russia in 1994, and Iran last month. (Of course the analogy is sometimes appropriate--even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then.)

• Ed Brayton calls attention to a Toledo Blade story about a proposal that originated in the Catholic Church and was furthered by Ohio's Republican attorney general: "An Ohio legislative panel yesterday rubber-stamped an unprecedented process that would allow sex offenders to be publicly identified and tracked even if they've never been charged with a crime." Anybody can be so labeled without any smidgen of due process. You know what everybody thinks of when you say "Salem, Massachusetts," even after 300 years? Try saying "Ohio" in 2306.

The MSM and blogs are coevolving into . . . who knows what. I'll leave the details for the techies to sort out in the future, but right now no one with even a passing interest in politics can keep up with the conversation without reading certain blogs--or talking to someone who does.

• In Illinois, Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and its cousin Illinoize--a metablog incorporating many points of view--are the best. This morning Miller drew on Tribune reporting to make clear the fact that Gov. Blagojevich's administration is setting up the same defense that Mayor Daley patronage chief Robert Sorich tried. Sorich claimed he only made "recommendations." That defense didn't save him, and Miller thinks it's unlikely to work for Blago.

• In the U.S., Brad De Long's Semi-Daily Journal is a gateway drug. Thursday morning he drew on New York Times analysis and other sources to explain why the upset of incumbent Senator Joseph Lieberman in the Connecticut primary was an uprising of "irate moderates." In the process he pulverized what little is left of Washington Post columnist David Broder's reputation.

• For those who'd rather think about politics than commit it, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a splendid post ("The Libertarian Vice") explaining how libertarians often beg the question: "The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. . . . But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government. The Finnish government has supported superb architecture. The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state. The interstate highway system in the U.S. was a high-return investment. In the area of foreign policy, we have done a good job juggling the China-Taiwan relationship. . . . It is possible to agree with the positive claims of libertarians about the virtues of markets but still think that improving the quality of government is the central task before us. One could love markets yet be some version of a modern liberal rather than a classical liberal. This possibility makes libertarians nervous, thus their desire to fix the quality of government in advance of making an argument."  Oh, just read the whole thing.  (FYI:  He links to his May 2, 2005, post on the characteristic vice of liberalism:  "The modern liberal vice is to think that everyone can be taken care of.")

A few years ago, I had to subscribe to multiple magazines--and wait up to a month--to find this much great reading. Now all this and more is at our fingertips every day.

To paraphrase your grandmother: if you can't say anything new, don't say anything at all.

So says Steven Berlin Johnson, who has wasted more time on yet another article (this one in the New Yorker) about the blogosphere vs. regular journalism. He proposes "five things all sane people agree about" on this subject, and asks all those who are just repeating them to please STFU:

• Blogs aren't historically unique. (I am legally required to agree with this point, as it's the basis of the Reader's claim to have been performing bloglike functions in print since August 1985.)

• Most bloggers are all about themselves and are uninterested in news or politics.

• The remaining minority will continue improving their coverage and analysis.

• Mainstream journalism isn't going away anytime soon.

• Mainstream journalism will continue to have a higher signal-to-noise ratio than most blogging.

Three out of five ain't bad--I want to cross off, or at least scribble over, the last two points. If this be insanity, make the most of it.

Coming from what used to be called the alternative press, I was dubious of the mainstream media long before most bloggers were born. The signal-to-noise ratio in the mainstream media is unacceptably high because mainstream reporters have no straightforward way to explain that they have been lied to by government officials, other than to repeat the lies and (long after the jump) perhaps acknowledge that some people think otherwise.

Nor do the MSM have good ways to report on scientific issues where they need to distinguish between real scientific controversies (like just how birds are descended from dinosaurs) and bogus controversies ginned up by dogmatic special pleaders (like whether evolution ever happens). In such cases you often get he-said-she-said stories, a format that frequently ends up causing a measurable decline in the sum total of human knowledge.

Those are structural problems. In practice, conditions aren't even that good, because mainstream reporters fail to follow their own best standards (or real-world expertise) even when their conventions allow it. Economists Dean Baker and Brad DeLong regularly pulverize the acts of journalism committed by the Washington Post and New York Times. The best recent example is here. 

Anyone who's ever hung out in the halls of academe will want to devour Terry Caesar's clever article on RateMyProfessors.com over at Inside Higher Education:

"One thing you immediately learn when you visit RATE is that students generally seem to care more passionately than you realized, and some are able to write with more wit than you saw in your own course evaluations," he writes. "A Top Twenty from the site circulates online, including 'Three of my friends got A’s in his class and my friends are dumb,' 'If I was tested on her family, I would have gotten an A,' and, my own favorite, 'BORING. But I learned there are 137 tiles on the ceiling.'

"From a reader’s point of view, who cares if these comments are accurate? They’re fun to read. From a colleague’s point of view, who cares if just about any comments are just? They’re irresistible to read, like gossip. RATE opens up the whole evaluative process insofar as teaching is concerned. Suddenly students get to say what they really think, not just to themselves but to a potential audience of thousands. Rather like guests on certain afternoon television talk shows, individuals feel inspired to be more recklessly candid."

In other words, sites like this are doing for educators what blogs are doing for journalists: the pros get to be publicly judged (and often smeared) by unqualified amateurs--who are also their customers.

Caesar doesn't mention the counterpart underground site Rate Your Students, now in estivation for the summer. It may make better reading for rant-lovers over 30, and in any case the slackers and nimrods often vilified there aren't named or shamed in public as the teachers are.

And yes, there is one for high schools nationwide. No doubt there are pearls of wisdom buried here somewhere, but this randomly selected comment will do for most: "she is f-ing awesome she passed me and I never showed up 4 swimming!!"

. . . but this time he's on to something. He writes,

"my own experience with this blog has only hardened my belief in the intrinsically derivative nature of blogging. As those of you who read the New Yorker know, I wrote a review of the book Wages of Wins this spring, and then blogged about it. The review and my posts prompted a good deal of comments, both on this site and on other blogs. But when I did a search, I was unable to find anyone, among the many who commented on my comments on Wages of Wins, who had actually read the book itself. That’s weird, I mean, it’s a short book. And it's really not that expensive. But nobody—even those who were in highest dudgeon about the book’s conclusions—seemed to want to do more than comment on those who had already commented. Isn’t that the very definition of derivative?"

Indeed. Earlier in his post he makes a different argument that's kind of dubious. There he defends traditional media on the grounds that bloggers very often play off them and link to them--hence blogs are not the future.  "Newspapers continue to perform an incredibly important function as informational gatekeepers—a function, as far as I can tell, that grows more important with time, not less."

Well, not so much. Blogs are having some success at doing what the alternative press has long tried to do--keeping the institutional gatekeepers honest, through commentary and independent reporting. How the media and the blogs will function together remains to be seen, but their relation is already symbiotic.

About books, Gladwell's making a different argument--not that bloggers are derivative but that they often don't take the time to know what they're being derivative of. On that point, he's surely on target. We bloggers are in a hurry to be first. This blog will be a month old tomorrow, and by my rough count I've had ten posts that were primarily about particular books. In two cases I had read the book from cover to cover. Just because 20 percent is better than average doesn't make it a passing grade, especially if I was unfair to the rest. 

Those who don’t read blogs tend to think that they’re extremist and weird. And those who pontificate on them are often staggeringly ill-informed. Alexander Cockburn, writing in CounterPunch, appears to think that moveon.org is a blog, and claims that the medium ruins writers:  

“Talented people feel they have to produce 400 words of commentary every day and you can see the lethal consequences on their minds and style, both of which turn rapidly to slush," Cockburn writes. "They glance at the New York Times and rush to their laptops to rewrite what they just read. Hawsers to reality soon fray and they float off, drifting zeppelins of inanity.”

Huh? What's up with those slushy zeppelins? I’ll just refer him to Whiskey Bar and be done with it.  

The egregious Lee Siegel of the flailing New Republic calls lefty bloggers “fascistic forces.” Even in today’s degraded and degrading media environment, this is silly. But Juan Cole thinks at least some antiblog nonsense has roots deeper than ignorance:

“For all the talk about freedom of speech and individual freedom in the United States, ours is actually a hierarchical society in which most people cannot afford to speak out unless they are themselves independently wealthy. . . . The very wealthy [not excluding the owner of the New Republic] are used to getting their way in U.S. politics and to dominating public discourse, since so much can be controlled at choke points. Journalists can just be fired, editors and other movers and shakers bought or intimidated. Look what happened to MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield, who dared complain about the propaganda in the U.S. news media around the Iraq War. Phil Donohue, who presided over MSNBC's most popular talk show, was apparently fired before the war because General Electric and Microsoft knew he would be critical of it, and did not want to take the heat. Politicians who step out of line can just be unseated by giving their opponents funding (the Supreme Court just made it harder to restrict this sort of thing).

“A grassroots communication system such as cyberspace poses a profound challenge to the forces of hierarchy and hegemony in American society. . . . Kos and his community, in short, are at the center of a discourse revolution. Now persons making a few tens of thousands of dollars a year can be read by hundreds of thousands of readers with no mediation from media moguls. . . . The lack of choke points in cyberspace means that people like Kos can't just be fired. How then to shut them up? Why, you attempt to ruin their reputation, as a way of scaring off readers and supporters.”

This is clearly not the whole story, since none of the above deign to notice that there are plenty of conservative, libertarian, reactionary, and entirely apolitical blogs.  If you've seen some intelligent commentary on the subject, link it up!

A nice addendum to this, from Scott McLemee: "There is still a tendency to think of bloggers, podcasters, etc as some distinct group that operates apart from the worlds of academia, publishing, or offline culture. To treat them, in effect, as ham-radio operators--people who possess a certain technical know-how, and who talk mainly to each other. The reality is very different." Read the whole thing.

Wikipedia says that blogs combine "text, images, and links."  By that standard, the Reader has had one since August 16, 1985, when the ink for "The City File" first hit the back pages of the paper. (Check out an image of that column below.)

Of course, back then we had neither the word "blog" nor hyperlink technology. "Google" was just a way to misspell a very large number, and any reader who questioned the information in an item had to make phone calls and/or visit a public library.  But a bloggy substance was already there in that first column--short snips that referred to original sources and occasionally provoked conversation.  
 
In that first blog entry I noted that local entrepreneurs had to find venture capital in Minneapolis; today Marshall Field's is set to become Macy's, dancing to a tune played at regional headquarters in--Minneapolis. Other items back then chronicled drug-war insanity and racism in schools and public housing, and one quoted now-famous new urbanist Peter Calthorpe's case that city dwellers are doing the environment a favor just by . . . being city dwellers.  

The medium has changed, but the stroboscopic alternation of insight and idiocy goes on.