By Ezra
It's sort of an odd quirk of Atrios's site that you really have to follow it for awhile before some of the elements make sense. For instance, I eventually broke down and e-mailed the man (the myth, and the legend) himself to figure out why someone named "Holden" kept getting ponies every time a new poll came out. Similarly, I'm sure if you just drop in every so often, "Wanker of the Day" seems like a drive-by vulgarity, a slab of red meat for an already gorged audience. But the feature actually has a substantive point.
Among other things, the lefty blogosphere was founded on a critique of the mainstream media that argued, contrary to popular belief, that the media was not actually liberal. The individuals who comprised it may have been tolerant on cultural issues, but years of sustained attacks from the right had cowed reporters into a hollow set of "objective" protocols that served to obscure truth rather than enhance it. Simultaneously, decades of sustained attacks on liberals had spurred "serious pundits" to underscore their independence by routinely attacking the left. The result was a media which may have voted Democratic, but was fairly hostile to progressivism.
"Wanker of the Day" is not an argumentative feature, it is a reinforcing one. It exists to repeatedly provide evidence for a critique of the media that is only now leaving the margins. Atrios's epiphany was that you had to actually prove it day after day, not merely argue it. Since this was a somewhat counterintuitive take on reportage, it had to be buttressed -- and not just once, but repeatedly. Now, you can argue about the language ("wanker") or even deny the feature's legitimacy, but it does have a point -- it's not simply rhetorical extremism or red meat.
