The Death Knell Part Duh

Source: WSJ

Every so often a piece comes along that is so bizarre, so beyond irony that it's actually difficult to blog on it (Ruben Navarette comes to mind for some odd reason). I mean seriously, when someone yanks out their Willy-Peter in public and begins parading around smearing Jello in their hair and screaming in their best Boy George imitation that they're "wild about fruit roll-ups!"

All you can really do is grimace and point. In that spirit I bring you Joseph Rago's cry for help...(and quite possibly a rather cynical attempt to score hits on their website, which is why I almost didn't post on this)

The Blog Mob
"Written by fools to be read by imbeciles."

Blogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg's press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.

The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there's more of it, because anybody can chip in. There's more "choice"--and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

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.

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: 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 . . .

Afraid of blogs much Joe? You should be.

If you care to subject yourself to more of his turgid pronouncements all delivered as though in his presumably copious schooling he'd never brushed up against the word 'irony'...here.

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