This article made it into our local paper yesterday. I remember thinking...this chick's running scared.

I don't think the regular media was ready for a 24/7 watchdog like much of the blogosphere has become.

It's not so much bile as it is cold diarrhea.

This is weak. Defensive, yes, but mostly weak.

Newspapers that want to improve? I don't think any of the "major" outlets are doing that (NYT, WaPo, LAT, etc.). And many regional papers, like the (Mpls) Strib, the Charlotte Observer, the Miami Herald, etc. are just as stuck on stupid.

And self-policing? The MSM is as monolithic as the Politburo.

One wonders if Maureen Dowd slipped this one in under Parker's name. I would have expected better.

jim -

I see I am not alone. I was thinking of the rersemblance to Maureen Dowd as well, and almost posted it that way.

That's a little too hard on Ms. Dumont, isn't it? Margaret was always clueless, but never mean-spirited. The shrill tone here reminds me more of the panic-stricken passenger in "Airplane!" who has to be slapped around (and worse) by Leslie Nielsen, the crew members and the other passengers.

Kathleen Parker, "maverick conservative," advises us to ignore the "ego-gratifying rabble who contribute only snark, sass and destruction," while offering little more than snark, sass and destruction. And I suspect that little more was accomplished with this column than ego gratification.

How un-self aware can a columnist be. Whoops, I'm sorry, I'm veering into snark and sass. Perhaps the major syndicators should offer us bloggers courses on civility and maybe instill in us a near-pathological allegiance to getting it right.

This sad excuse for a reporter just proves the point about the MSM being stationed in an ivory tower. It is interesting that the first thing leftist journalists do when they find some venue that criticizes them is to seek some way to "control" it and lacking that it must be vilified.

The hypocrisy literally rages from the paragraphs of her article; every charge she leveled at the blogosphere could be multiplied by ten and turned back on the MSM.

I will give her the benefit of the doubt and say she just doesn't get it - wait - no I won't. She gets it fine. She just hate what she gets.

It's not Dowd. Dowd would be more clever with the wordplay, and even less coherent.

I must say that I do agree with her observation that blogging does leave the much of the heavy lifting to traditional newspapers because it relies on stories from newspapers. This was really true at the beginning of blogging and is still true for some blogs, although as blogging evolves there is more reporting by blogs. Here statement is true; however, I think blogging puts things in context much better. Lots of reporters are not very knowledgable in many areas (law, military tatics and strategy, science, math, history, economics, etc.) With blogging, there are people who are a lot more knowledgable about these subjects and they tend to be more truthful and insightful.

I remember when I clerked for a judge after law school. I would be present for entire 2 week trial and I would know the ins and outs about the case. The local newspaper would have a reporter on the courthouse beat writing about the case and I would read the article and wonder if that reporter was actually writing about the same case. He would get lots of things incorrect regarding the actual law in the case. It was pretty bad because the reporter supposedly had lots of years of experience writing about courthouse issues.

I love pieces like this; the rage shows that the Net is a real to them and they know it. every time an MSM personality tries to slag blogs I crack open a bottle of champagne (I'm gettin kinda buzzed.)

Ahem: "...a real THREAT to them..."

In an earlier comment, I suggested that the MSM syndicators offer us bloggers courses. I fear that I am too late. In perusing Ms. Parker's bio, I notice that she "teaches writing courses to professionals as director of the School of Written Expression at the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion in Camden, South Carolina."

I assume that the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion is not named for William F.

She's largely right, thus our rules:

Here are the rules we try to follow:

(1) No profanity.

(2) Minimal self-reference (though none would be unnatural)

(3) Minimal linking to other blogs.

(4) Minimal reference to comments. (Folks who write comments don't get
to do so on the front page, so we try not to write about them on the front.)

(5) Try--though I'm bad about this myself--to only quote about three
paragraphs, or no more than a third, of any story you blog. We want
folks to go read it at the site that owns it. But if you need to use
more to make the excerpt make sense, no problem.

(6) Always link to the original--we want folks to read the whole thing--and don't use links that pop up a new browser window. It's annoying for readers and if we aren't interesting enough for them to navigate back to us, that's our problem.

(7) Never let it interfere with real life.

Brian:

I assume that the Buckley School of Public Speaking and Persuasion is not named for William F.

It is named after his brother Reid Buckley. Really!

OJ does have a point, in that this blog is more polite than many others I have seen. Ms. Parker would have an aneurysm were she to read Usenet postings, I imagine.

Nonetheless, her critique has several parts, only one of which is the politeness factor (I would also conjecture the give and take on this blog would still be too much for her, although I cannot prove it of course). Her defensiveness and general peevishness tell much more of the story than she realizes.

I agree. Not Margaret Dumont. Her charm was that she never got the jokes, and she knew it, tried not to let you know that, and failed. This woman is more like the wives paired up with W.C. Fields in movies like The Bank Dick, whose only joy seems into making The Great Man's life even more miserable.

I don't visit other blogs the way I used to, but it is more than a little scary how quickly most of them seem to dissolve quickly into screeching bile. Lord of the Flies is not a bad analogy. This is a pretty special place Orrin has crafted.

But in addition to his rules, Orrin's artful use of Canada to siphon off the frothing irrationalism that resides in us all and thus leave his posters fresh for civilized, respectful debate on all other issues is nothing short of genius.

her real worry is that she knows nothing about anything, and on any given topic there will be many blogs run by people expert on that topic. so no matter what she writes about, he ignorance will shine through and be brought to the attention of her putative readers. in short, she is a hack in an age when hackism is dying. good looking though.

toe - Ewwwwwwwww!

http://www.townhall.com/images/contributors/parker.gif

maybe this is an old pic but she rates ok in my book. i'd camp with her on brokeback mountian:)

"... Orrin's artful use of Canada to siphon off the frothing irrationalism..."

Nothing irrational about it. What other reason does the place have for existance other than to balance out Mexico?

And I'm surprised you didn't accuse him of stealing the idea from South Park.

One of the things I've noticed is that for most weblogs, when the number of comments for any random posting regularly hits triple digits, that part has become useless. Mostly because the last 80 or so are dominated by two or three people engaged in their own mutual admiration society or trying to imitate all the worst qualities of Usenet, or worst of all, saying "Me Too!". I know I've tried to contribute here by deleting about half of my postings when I realize they add nothing to what hasn't been said before, and better.

De gustibus non est disputandum!

I read the whole thing in this evening's paper. This is one unhinged human being. She's my first 2006 pick for MOONBAT OR THE WEEK.

I'm with OJ and Peter - she may be paranoid, but she's pretty much right.

Most blogs are insane. This one is merely eccentric.

Mrs. Parker is a decent person and a good writer. She's largely correct, but there are some big differences. Like journalism, you can find anything in blogs, from the best to the worst. But blogs are more of a conversation than the top-down Vajournalism Monologues.

However, if we take the daily dose of aid & comfort on the front page of the Times as the industry standard, it's little wonder that there is finally some citizen push-back. Freedom is messy that way.

She reminds me a little of a Justice Rehnquist defending the concept of judicial immunity from impeachment, no matter how outrageous the ruling. A decent person grown a little to close to a great--but flawed--institution.