My Massively Mediocre Moment

Buckdog posted a link to this WSJ Opinion piece and, being massively mediocre and all, I couldn't resist running with it.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.

I don't recall when I, or any other blogger for that matter, declared ourselves "journalists". We aren't reporters, we are commentators, you know, individuals with opinions about the scraps the reporters toss us. Rather than remora fish try thinking of us as coyotes, here to pick the meat from your dead, white bones.

I don't personally harbor many delusions about my own mythical significance, more to the point would be yours.

A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

Most of us are carelessly informal as you say, we are bloggers, not journalists...see above for explanation. The remainder of your complaints can only make me laugh, same could be said of much of the "legitimate" media.

The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.

Some people are, so exactly what is your point? Despite your loquacious, logorrheic, and more than a little solipsistic opinion, I have to wonder what percentage of your brain is firing on all cylinders. Nice form, big holes in your substance.

Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses.

I doubt most of the bloggers would even aspire to being imbeciles of greater renown than the ones we've managed to elect or enshrine as celebrities. That would entail entirely too much effort dear.

I would also have serious doubts about even the most well known blogs being as widely followed as nearly any news cast on any news network so that would beg the question: exactly who is gratifying the mediocrity of the masses?

This is of course simply my own massively mediocre opinion due to the fact that I am in no way nearly as important and enlightened as yourself or your brethren and self-appointed guardians of the truth as you see it.

You have a nice day Mr. Rago and feel free to kiss my ass