Posted 1/17/2004 11:17:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
AFTER THE FALL: Joanne Jacobs links to a powerful story in The Christian Science Monitor of a 14-year-old Baghdad girl who criticized the American invasion. But "now the ex-Baathist youth group member has changed her view", writes Jacobs. I suspect there's a lot of that going on--and not just in Iraq.

Posted 1/17/2004 09:51:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
"I GAVE AT THE OFFICE": Howard Kurtz writes that journalists aren't loathe to donate to politicians. Frankly, I don't have any problem with reporters--or their bosses--donating money to political campaigns. But doesn't this undercut their frequent claims that they're impartial? Of course, claiming impartiality and neutrality is a relatively new phenomenon for journalists. As Bob Goldfarb wrote back in December:

I think history will show the faith in unbiased journalistic "truth" to have been a temporary aberration. The national papers of Great Britain, like the American press of the 19th century, are popular precisely because of their well-known ideological positions, not from any pretense of neutrality. They report the news by their own lights, recognizing that readers prefer the news to be filtered through values and beliefs similar to their own. So does The New York Times. The Times has become America's only truly national, general-interest newspaper because it has the best reporting, writing, and editing in the country...and because its worldview matches that of its target consumers. It doesn't need to purport to be unbiased.

Sooner or later, the media needs to move away from feigning impartiality, because nobody in their audience buys it. They really ought to consider employing the strategy that has allowed a thousand narrowcasted blogs to flourish, and start saying something like, "yes, we're biased--just like you are. And we know you have lots of different news sources to choose from, each with own slant on things. But if you're a [Republican/Democrat/atheist/Muslim/hobbit/Wookie] we think you'll like us." UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz writes:

Everybody is biased: it's human nature. And the way for journalists to deal with it isn't to remain ignorant, or shun open participation in politics, or engage in ostentatious rituals of non-partisanship. It is to admit their biases and allow their customers to make up their own minds about how to interpret information the media provide. Political contributions are among the clearest indicators, certainly clearer than words, of contributors' political biases. Far from forbidding them, we should encourage journalists to make such contributions as long as they disclose them. The public is smart enough to evaluate the results. And by permitting political participation by journalists we might encourage better people to become journalists, because becoming a journalist would no longer mean trying to ignore one's own carefully developed opinions, or abandoning a high-level career in the industry one covers. Disclosure, not bureaucratic restriction of behavior, is the answer here.

I agree.

Posted 1/17/2004 04:01:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
DOING A CLYMER? Is Howard Dean trying to score points with conservatives by stiffing Maureen Dowd? Matt Drudge writes, in his characteristically breathless copy, that:

NEW YORK TIMES op-ed queen Maureen Dowd was left waiting by the phone by Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. After scheduling a phone interview with Dowd at her hotel in Des Moines, the candidate never called!

Add this to the Kerry flip-flop over gutting the Agriculture Department, and if you didn't know better, you'd say that these guys were trying to reach across the aisle for voters. But I think in the case of Dean and Kerry, sometimes an F-up is just an F-up. (And for those of you who don't remember the Adam Clymer incident, click here.) UPDATE: Maybe there's more truth to this than I thought. I hadn't read the Jonah Goldberg piece about Clymer since it first ran back in September of 2000. But Jonah wrote that "sticking it to the press is a bipartisan tradition":

Journalists hate to admit it, but beating up the press is a populist gambit. The media ranks at the bottom of almost every survey when it comes to public trust and confidence. More than a third of America actually thinks our press hurts democracy, according to one major survey. For all of their--often sincere--convictions that journalists are looking out for the little guy, most people see the press as an arrogant and unaccountable priesthood of kingmakers or, in the common vernacular, @$#&*!s.

It will be interesting to see what sort of reaction this very minor tempest in a thimble gets. ANOTHER UPDATE: Must have been a deliberate effort by Dean. Pejman Yousefzadeh writes, "my respect for Howard Dean just skyrocketed". ONE MORE UPDATE: Orrin Judd writes, "Memo to Howard Dean: If you're a fire hydrant already, best not to give MoDo any more reason to whiz on you".

Posted 1/17/2004 03:37:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
READY ON THE LEFT, READY ON THE RIGHT: James Panero looks back at William F. Buckley's Firing Line TV show, quoting from a classic episode from the late 1960s.

Posted 1/17/2004 12:30:48 PM by Edward Driscoll
LIBERTARIANS FOR KERRY! Brian Doherty of Reason says Kerry's "my man!"--well, sort of.

Posted 1/16/2004 01:00:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT WOULD MEL BLANC DO? Scroll down to the middle of the page, to read James Taranto's exploration of cartoon physics and politics in his "Best of the Web Today" column.

Posted 1/16/2004 12:33:45 PM by Edward Driscoll
RECESS APPOINTMENT: "Bush Installs Pickering on Appeals Court". I love this line in the AP story: Democrats "said they wouldn't be able to trust Pickering to keep his conservative opinions out of his work on the federal appeals court." Of course, all liberal judges keep their biases away the bench, right? UPDATE: There's a round-up of coverage of Pickering from "The Corner" (start here and scroll down) and InstaPundit.

Posted 1/16/2004 12:27:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME: Kevin M. Cherry writes on the coming demise of Frasier, ending a 22-year tradition that began with Cheers:

When Cheers premiered all those years ago, it came in last in the weekly ratings. Yet what is most impressive about the early shows is their quality: Many of the highlights of the series come from these two seasons, as evidenced by the best-of 200th episode (hosted by John McLaughlin). The performances are already spot-on, and the writers had a firm grasp of the different personalities. The series' creators — Glen and Les Charles and James Burrows, who had honed their skills on Taxi — originally contemplated an American version of the John Cleese-Connie Booth classic, Fawlty Towers. However, they came to realize that the best scenes took place in the bar, and set the entire series in a Boston pub based on the Bull and Finch Tavern. Over the years, Cheers had its growing pains. The second season is weaker than the first, as too much attention is paid to the blooming relationship between Sam (Ted Danson) and Diane (Shelley Long). As Norm puts it in one episode, "I kinda miss the good old days when they threw up at the sight of each other." The series would reach its high points over the next two seasons, with the introduction of Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) as Diane's new (and soon to be jilted) fiancé, which causes the Diane-Sam relationship to mature. The sudden death of Nick Colasanto (Coach) forced the writers to introduce Indiana farm-boy Woody (Woody Harrelson), as the bar's resident simpleton, but he never was able to equal what Danson refers to as Colasanto's "heart and soul, the sweetness of Cheers." Even so, this replacement worked far better than did the introduction of Rebecca (Kirstie Alley) after Diane left. Apart from the staff, the other characters throughout the years — Frasier's wife Lilith (Bebe Neuwirth), Harry the Hat (Harry Anderson), Carla's (Rhea Perlman, the first person cast) various ex-husbands — came and drank, but it was really Norm (George Wendt) and Cliff (John Ratzenberger) who came, drank, and stayed in our comedic memories.

The notion that Cheers did its best work in its earliest seasons is certainly understandable--every TV show does its best work in its earliest seasons. I remember seeing Jim Carrey being interviewed shortly after his first hit movies came out, and he said that when he worked on In Living Color, after the first couple of seasons, everybody on the show was strictly on auto-pilot. (The same could be said for Miami Vice.) M*A*S*H's best episodes were its first three seasons, and then it gradually began to decay. The original Star Trek's best season was its first, but oddly enough, The Next Generation did its best work in its third and fourth seasons, ironically because Gene Roddenberry was less involved with the show, as his health declined. (That's a whole other subject.) I actually haven't watched a new episode of Frasier in quite a while, but that's OK: between syndicated reruns and DVDs, like Cheers, the show will be floating around the pop culture ether for quite some time to come.

Posted 1/16/2004 10:49:36 AM by Edward Driscoll
ROGER SIMON: "Matt Drudge may have put the nail in the coffin of the Wesley Clark candidacy".

Posted 1/16/2004 10:47:25 AM by Edward Driscoll
YOU DON'T SAY: "Book Claims French Bias Against Iraq War".

Posted 1/16/2004 12:58:16 AM by Edward Driscoll
FASHION BLOGGING: My fashion sense was developed in the mid-80s, and back then, I'd continually see ads for Ralph Lauren's Polo line. The men and women in those iconic images were dressed and groomed in an impossibly cool and WASPY style, much like the swells who attended Gatsby's parties in the 1920s (and not coincidentally, Lauren's name was made when he costumed the mid-'70s version of The Great Gatsby that starred Robert Redford). So...who on earth are these guys? How did they sneak into a Ralph Lauren ad with those silly clothes? And why does Ralph think I want to look like any of them? Just curious.

Posted 1/15/2004 11:35:03 PM by Edward Driscoll
MUST SCREECH TV: The A&E Network has introduced a new reality TV show called Airline. As Jesse Walker of Reason writes:

The new series Airline contains no celebrities, no courtships, no game-show rules—just a bunch of cameras recording the everyday Fear Factor of American airports. If there's an underlying message, it's that the only thing that might be less pleasant than traveling on an airline is having a job that forces you to deal regularly with air travelers. * * * One reason that environment is so unpleasant, of course, is that it treats travelers as children, keeping us in the dark about what's happening behind the scenes and stripping us of both freedoms and responsibilities. A system that infantilizes is bound to produce infants; men and women capable of behaving maturely at home or at work will suddenly erupt into embarassing tantrums. The results aren't pretty. But that doesn't mean they can't make for compelling television.

Gentlemen, include me out, as Sam Goldwyn used to say. Flying--and waiting in airports--is brutal enough for me, without having to watch others endure it.

Posted 1/15/2004 05:37:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
"HUNDREDS PROTEST AS BUSH VISITS MLK TOMB": Talk about a no-win scenario. If he didn't place a wreath on Martin Luther King's tomb, he'd be called an aloof racist. But President Bush gets flak because he honors Dr. King? As John J. Miller writes, "Left-wing blacks...Accuse him of playing politics with an American icon--but the truth is that by protesting Bush's small gesture, they're the ones playing politics. And looking like fools, too". UPDATE: Scott Burgess agrees. I certainly understand that every president will have his share of protesters. But it is interesting which stories the media plays up as their launching pad to rail against him. With President Clinton, there were conservatives who disagreed with his every action. I don't recall them getting as much media attention as President Bush's detractors.

Posted 1/15/2004 04:55:22 PM by Edward Driscoll
I'M SHOCKED--SHOCKED! "Democrats More Likely Than Republicans to Watch ABC, CBS and NBC". Bernard Goldberg, call your office.

Posted 1/15/2004 04:45:20 PM by Edward Driscoll
I GOTTA FEEVAH!!! And the only prescription, is more cowbell!!! Just wanted to share that. Carry on.

Posted 1/15/2004 02:09:08 PM by Edward Driscoll
WESLEY CLARK is against the war in Iraq, right? Well, actually, only sometimes. Back in the early '90s, when he was part of Bill Clinton's administration, George Stephanopoulos was quoted as saying "we are being held hostage by Lexus/Nexus". And that was a few years before the Internet was on everyone's desktop. Now it's that much easier to find out who's been backtracking, dissembling, lying, and spinning. UPDATE: Like this story!

Posted 1/15/2004 02:02:43 PM by Edward Driscoll
JAY NORDLINGER IS IN RARE FORM in his "Impromptus" column today. Be sure to at least read his thoughts about Oscar Biscet--and check out Madison Wisconsin's latest billboard. It makes a nice bookend to one of Seattle's statues.

Posted 1/14/2004 11:58:47 PM by Edward Driscoll
"YEAH, BABY"--my exact, knee-jerk unconscious, unplanned verbalized remark to this sentence in James Lileks' latest Bleat:

Because we're going back. Yeah, baby. Yeah! (Oh and--faster please.) Incidentally, this is probably as good a place as any to post a link to an article on a somewhat related topic that I had entirely too much fun researching and writing.

Posted 1/14/2004 11:43:50 PM by Edward Driscoll
ARISTOS is a fascinating look at the arts and society. It's a Website that serves as a companion to What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, by Louis Torres & Michelle Marder Kamhi.

Posted 1/14/2004 11:25:30 PM by Edward Driscoll
IF GLOBAL WARMING is one pillar of the environmental left, and must be taken on religious faith, no matter how much scientific evidence is against it, then recycling is definitely the other. The American Enterprise looks at its "eight myths".

Posted 1/14/2004 11:17:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
TiVO ALERT: Dennis Miller's new show on CNBC is less than two weeks away, the New York Times writes, in a surprisingly sympathetic profile of Miller.

Posted 1/14/2004 09:30:44 PM by Edward Driscoll
WHAT A DIFFERENCE A DAY MAKES: On Wednesday, President Bush outlined his Kennedy-esque plan for a return to the moon by 2015. On Thursday, former Vice President Al Gore, on what's expected to be the coldest day in New York in a decade, will warn of the dangers of global warming. I'm not a big government guy, but if we have to have a bloated federal bureaucracy, far better that it aim for the stars, then try to block progress via environmental extremism.

Posted 1/14/2004 07:36:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
49ERS QB JEFF GARCIA arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.

Posted 1/14/2004 04:20:36 PM by Edward Driscoll
"I GO WAY BACK WITH LOVIE", Dennis Miller once quipped. "I remember when he was married to Jim Backus". Da Bears name Rams defensive coordinator Lovie Smith their new head coach.

Posted 1/14/2004 04:11:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
TROOPERGATE, THE NEXT GENERATION: ABCNEWS.com reports that the state trooper who headed Dean's security detail for nine years "was repeatedly abusing his wife". Despite this, Dean "has taken a tough, zero-tolerance stand on domestic violence, accusing the Bush administration of not being committed to the issue". Between his gaffes, and scandals coming to the light (gee, now we know at least one reason why Dean ordered his records sealed), Dean's in trouble. He's probably got enough momentum to get the nomination, but is his record too flawed to gain any traction come this fall? UPDATE: On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan is not amused. "What a vile little smear story from ABC News", Sullivan writes. "I knew this campaign was getting tough, but this kind of irrelevant piece of guilt by association is truly beneath contempt". Hey, at least this time, it's a Democrat being savaged by the press. And it's not October, so this will all be forgotten by the fall.

Posted 1/14/2004 03:20:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
NURSE BLOOMBERG: Will the Big Apple's mayor (and definitive RINO) be facing GOP mayoral challenges in '05?

Posted 1/14/2004 01:50:18 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE FLIP-FLOPPING KATIE COURIC: Brent Baker writes:

What a difference the target makes. Five years ago, when George Stephanopoulos wrote a book with critical insider accounts of President Clinton’s White House, NBC’s Katie Couric asserted the book “has many wondering whether he's a traitor or man of integrity,” stressed how “a lot of people” see Stephanopoulos’ book as “creepy” and she told him that they view him “as a turncoat, a Linda Tripp type.” She was also upset by the timing: “Why now George? Couldn’t this have waited until the President was out of office?” But nearly five years later, in introducing a segment with Paul O’Neill, Couric wasn’t upset that O’Neill issued his charges in an election year as she recalled how “President Bush once praised Secretary O’Neill for his candor. He was called a straight shooter,” but “today O’Neill is under investigation for a tell-all book that raises serious questions about the Bush administration.” Couric plugged the interview: “Does Mr. O’Neill think the administration’s threat of investigation is payback for his so-called honesty? We’ll talk about that and some other things.”

As Roger Simon noted earlier today, "The Internet is the greatest memory device we have ever had. It stores virtually everything for instant access—it’s very difficult to hide what you have said. Bloggers and others will dig it out and force the media to publicize it". And expose the media itself when it lies, obfuscates and flip-flops.

Posted 1/14/2004 01:41:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
FALSE ALARM: No chemical agent found in recently discovered Iraqi shells.

Posted 1/14/2004 01:22:58 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"There's no real rationale for colonization of the Moon, so it's hard not to be cynical and conclude this is the space-age equivalent of bread and circuses," Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a Democratic research group, said in The New York Times the other day.

Good thing JFK didn't follow his advice. JFK has long been an iconic image for Democrats. Bush's space proposals allow him to triangulate off Kennedy's resonating spirit--and present the perfect to trap for liberals and leftists who oppose them to fall into. UPDATE: "Translation: This would be such a good idea, if only it wasn't George W. Bush's". Looks like another case of hypocrophobia.

Posted 1/13/2004 09:33:54 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUAGMIRE WATCH: Steven Den Beste links to an ABC News article, and notes what must be...

Rule number one for all reporters in Iraq and their editors back home:

Thou shalt not report any good news without also including bad news. Thus shalt thou maintain balance. (However, reporting bad news without any offsetting good news is perfectly acceptable.)

It doesn't surprise me. We noticed CNN's first report of a quagmire in Iraq back in February of last year--three weeks before the war began! See also these thoughts from Brent Bozell and John O'Sullivan from September on why Vietnam analogies desperately need to be retired from the media's vocabulary.

Posted 1/13/2004 08:05:04 PM by Edward Driscoll
CHEESESTEAK BLOGGING: Jeff Jarvis looks at McDonald's new cheesesteak sandwich. McDonald's had a great steak sandwich (no cheese, but a zesty BBQ sauce and caramalized onions) in the early 1980s. It didn't last long--and bore little resemblance to something I'd buy in South Philly--but it was surprisingly tasty. (Of course, I was 15 at the time. I'm not sure if I'd give it such a glowing recommendation today.)

Posted 1/13/2004 07:57:51 PM by Edward Driscoll
TWO GREAT TASTES THAT TASTE GREAT TOGETHER: Tech Central Station looks at the Fed-Ex/Kinko's merger.

Posted 1/13/2004 07:54:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
ACCORDING TO ESPN, the Buffalo Bills have a new head coach.

Posted 1/13/2004 07:48:41 PM by Edward Driscoll
YEAH, BUT AT LEAST BARKLEY COULD DUNK: The Paul O'Neill/Charles Barkley connection revealed.

Posted 1/13/2004 07:16:02 PM by Edward Driscoll

HOWARD DEAN missed a great opportunity for a "Sistah Souljah" moment during the debate on Sunday. Instead he was faced--really faced--by Al Sharpton. UPDATE: That's a devastating cartoon by Chris Muir.

Posted 1/13/2004 07:11:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
SHAPES OF THINGS BEFORE MY EYES: Virginia Postrel quotes from a discussion on Meet The Press about the dimensions of Democrats. Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis has Howard Dean under his thumb. Or is it the other way around?

Posted 1/13/2004 06:45:53 PM by Edward Driscoll
'BOUT TIME: "Largest British Airline Will Accept Armed Air Marshals".

Posted 1/13/2004 01:48:14 PM by Edward Driscoll
DID A EUROPEAN BROADCASTING AGENCY really utter the phrase, "in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive"?? Yes the BBC did just that. (Link via InstaPundit.) UPDATE: Meanwhile in France:

A comedian's skit portraying a Palestinian guerrilla wearing a Jewish Orthodox hat and giving the Nazi salute on state-owned French television has raised an outcry and is under investigation by a Paris prosecutor for racial defamation. Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, an often provocative French comedian, appeared on France 3 Television in December as a masked guerrilla wearing a Jewish Orthodox hat and called on "young people watching from suburban housing projects to convert like me ... and join the American-Zionist axis." He then shouted "IsraeHeil" and made the Nazi salute.

I guess, especially after 1941, the Jewish question is less sensitive in France. But hey, just a month ago, didn't Noam Chomsky say that anti-Semitism "scarcely exists now" in the West?

Posted 1/13/2004 01:42:56 PM by Edward Driscoll
PROFILES FROM THE FUTURE: James Pinkerton, writing in the year 2054, looks at a possible future of America.

Posted 1/13/2004 01:28:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
BULLDOZING THE COMPETITION: Charles Johnson posts the winner of the Robert Fisk Award for Idiotarian of the Year 2003.

Posted 1/13/2004 12:07:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
SAY, THIS IS INTERESTING: Stephen Green links to a Website called Memeorandum, which apparently is some sort of bot-based site designed to list recent news articles and what top bloggers are saying about them. Top Bloggers? Of course--we're listed! (And we tip our fedora to Gabe, the creater of the site for including us. Thanks!)

Posted 1/12/2004 10:49:33 PM by Edward Driscoll
ANGRY WHITE MAN: Jason Riley looks at Dean and the black vote.

Posted 1/12/2004 10:39:10 PM by Edward Driscoll
BOB'S YOUR ANCHOR: Looks who's talking (again)--Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, AKA Baghdad Bob! Shouldn't this guy be rotting in a cell next Saddam? Is he on a Willie Horton-style furlow program? At the conclusion of WWII, Goebbels committed suicide, Tokyo Rose was sentenced to ten years in prison, and the British hanged Lord Haw Haw. If the Post's article is true, why on Earth is Baghdad Bob free to do a TV show??

Posted 1/12/2004 06:55:11 PM by Edward Driscoll
YOU HIRE CARVILLE, I'LL HIRE MATALIN: Texas congressman's ex-wife says she'll run against him.

Posted 1/12/2004 04:17:05 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE LOGICAL CONCLUSION: Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review takes one of the phallic-oriented theories of the left to its natural conclusion:

I always enjoy appearances of the phallic theory of gun ownership. ("Take gun control. Despite the precipitate drop in crime, white men cling ever more tightly to their guns, and the right to lock and load is a major link between pistol-packing papas and the Republican Party. Assume that most of these guys cherish their weapons for other than practical reasons, and you can see the pull of the phallic on American politics.") Do the people who deploy this theory not realize its implications? If they're right, then gun control is a kind of symbolic castration. How likely is that to be successful as a policy? Or as a political platform?

As someone once said, heh.

Posted 1/12/2004 02:01:01 PM by Edward Driscoll
DAN THE MAN: Dan Marino hired as the Miami Dolphin's football operations director. UPDATE: Chris Carter, who's worked with Marino for HBO's NFL show, has some thoughts, including a reason why Marino isn't Matt Millen: The Next Generation.

Posted 1/12/2004 01:33:42 PM by Edward Driscoll
SOMEWHERE AROUND 2010, PRESIDENT RICE will be meeting with these two European political leaders. UPDATE: Kimberly Swygert agrees, making a point similar to one we made last year.

Posted 1/12/2004 11:41:08 AM by Edward Driscoll
GOD IS A CONCEPT by which we measure Howard Dean, writes Christopher Buckley in an amusing Opinion Journal piece.

Posted 1/12/2004 11:38:22 AM by Edward Driscoll
RAGE OF A RELIC: John Fund writes, "Paul O'Neill is angry that the world has passed him by". UPDATE: John Hawkins also has some thoughts on O'Neill.

Posted 1/11/2004 05:27:55 PM by Edward Driscoll
JUST DO IT: Hilarious Easter Egg on Amazon, if you act today. (Link via Jeff Jarvis.)

Posted 1/11/2004 02:39:59 PM by Edward Driscoll
THE EVER-CLEVER FIELDING DODGE MEETS THE NEW, NEW JOURNALISM: In his nifty mid-1970s anthology, The New Journalism (now sadly out of print, but readily available used) Tom Wolfe wrote that in the mid-1960s:

When Truman Capote insisted that In Cold Blood was not journalism but a new literary genre he had invented, "the nonfiction novel," a flash went through my mind. It was the familiar "Aha!" flash. In this case: "Aha! the ever-clever Fielding dodge!" When Henry Fielding published his first novel, Joseph Andrews, in 1742, he kept protesting that his book was not a novel--it was a new literary genre he had invented, "the comic epic poem in prose. He made the same claim for Torn Jones. He compared his books to the Margites, which was believed to be a lost comic epic of ancient Greece (by Homer, some said). What he was doing, of course--and what Capote would be doing 223 years later--was trying to give his work the cachet of the reigning literary genre of his time, so that literary people would take it seriously. The reigning genre in Fielding's time was epic poetry and verse-drama of the classical sort. The status of the novel was so low--well, it was as low as the status of magazine journalism in 1965 when Capote started publishing In Cold Blood in The New Yorker. Thanks to this initial "Aha!" flash, I began to notice a curious thing. The early days of this new journalism were beginning to look like an absolute rerun of the early days of the realistic novel in England. A slice of literary history was repeating itself. I don't mean repetition in the vague sense of "there's nothing new under the sun." I mean exact repetition, deja vu, finicky details. The very same objections that greeted the novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were starting to greet the New Journalism. In each case the new form is seen as "superficial," "ephemeral," "mere entertainment," "morally irresponsible." Some of the arguments were so similar it was uncanny.

Flashforward from the 1960s and '70s to today (literally), when Roger Simon (not the Blogosphere's numero ono Roger Simon--but you probably know that already), said, on Meet The Press:

MR. RUSSERT: But you're a blogger. MR. SIMON: I am a blogger sort of. I mean, the difference between--look, a true blog is I woke up this morning, I decided to skip chem class, now I want to write about the last episode of "Friends." That's what blogs are. You know, it's people talking to each other. My site is actually written columns. There's a difference between writing and typing basically. [Emphasis mine.]

So Meet The Press, to talk about blogs, interviews a guy who says he's doesn't blog! It's the ever-clever Fielding dodge tarted up for the 21st century's equivalent of the New Journalism: Not me! Don't lump me in with that rabble proletariat who blogs. I don't blog--I write columns. I'm old school. I'm one of you fellows. (And just to bring things full circle, notice Simon's updating of Capote's famous bon mot, "that's not writing, that's typing". (Which isn't to say that Blogs--even the blogs of both Roger Simons--are the equivilent of Capote's In Cold Blood, of course. But I think both Simons understand that.) Maybe, if it wanted to talk about blogs, Meet The Press would be better served if it had on somebody who actually will admit to, you know...blogging! The other Roger Simon would be perfect--a guy who has written novels and screenplays, and now blogs--and admits to it. And understands the medium. Or Virginia Postrel, who blogs, has edited magazines, and writes for The New York Times. Or Andrew Sullivan (although to be fair, he's got the flu this weekend.) Or maybe (say, here's a thought), the man, the myth, the legend, Glenn Reynolds. Or does that make too much sense?

Posted 1/11/2004 12:58:19 PM by Edward Driscoll
QUOTE OF THE DAY: On Friday, we mentioned that Castro has made Internet access more difficult for the vast majority of the poor souls trapped in Cuba. David Carr writes, "So there we have it. A country that has (allegedly) 100% rates of literacy but you are not allowed to actually read anything".

Posted 1/11/2004 12:05:21 PM by Edward Driscoll
TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE: Reed Johnson of the L.A. Times writes:

Sometime in the future, the media may look back on 2003 as the year when a number of warning bells were sounded. But as an industry it seems we're still trying to agree on how to locate the fires, let alone how to put them out.

Reading his article, you get the feeling that Johnson obviously knows there's a problem, and I commend him for pointing it out. But he's only partially right: the warning bells began to go off a long time before 2003. The public, en masse, only began to hear them last year. I don't know if the media as a whole can hear them--or if they can, are aware of how loudly they're ringing. And if they can, do much about them. Johnson's industry is too set on auto-pilot, and too paralyzed by political correctness to radically change their direction. Further into his article (it goes without saying: RTWT) while Johnson properly rebukes Christiane Amanpour for saying that the press was muzzled, he never explains why CNN was really muzzled: they were in hock to Saddam Hussein. And check out this quote, that goes uncommented on by Johnson:

"You have to consider real news that serves the democracy kind of like a public utility," [Kristina Borjesson, a former reporter-producer for CBS] says. "And you would not want the bottom line to get in the way of your receiving electricity or clean water. Well, in a sense, real information on what the arena of power is doing either nationally or internationally, on behalf of all of us, on behalf of the people, that's almost like a utility."

But utilities are increasingly no longer monopolies. I have options when it comes to most of them: if my water is cloudy, I can buy bottled water or a filter. If my phone rates go up too high, I can change carriers--or consider using more online chat or Internet telephony. Satellite TV has more channels and better picture quality than cable, so I switched. If my electricity is funky, I can add surge protectors, or depending upon how upset I am, install my own back-up generator. And after 9/11, when my news sources seemed like they were stuck in Hue City covering the Tet Offensive of 1968, I changed 'em. And you know what? If you're reading this, you did too. I started my own blog, because I wanted to express opinions on material I normally don't write about during my day gigs. There's no reason why you can't either. As Matt Drudge once said, "Roger Ailes told me early on, you don't need a license to report. You need a license to do hair." Utilities are not monopolies--and while the media's monopoly on news gathering will remain for the forseeable future, they no longer have a monopoly on opinion. And it scares them.

Posted 1/11/2004 11:17:56 AM by Edward Driscoll
15 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Paul Krugman fisks Maureen Dowd--two weeks before she wrote the column!

Posted 1/11/2004 12:00:48 AM by Edward Driscoll
CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE: Less than a month after his father died, the Philadelphia media is trashing Brett Favre--and his late father. Really classy, fellows.