Glenn Greenwald, whose stuff is often excellent, has unleashed a breathtakingly misguided attack at The New Republic today. As one would expect, it's getting many a link, and those who long ago decided The New Republic a festering tumor attached to our body politic are excitedly congratulating Glenn for his bit of amateur surgery. But while the operation is technically impressive (no one disputes Greenwald's ability to turn a phrase), we're dealing with some serious malpractice here:
many establishment journalists have raging contempt for the blogosphere. It is a contempt grounded in the fallacy of credentialism and a pseudo-elitist belief that only the approved and admitted members of their little elite journalist club can be trusted to enlighten the masses. Many of them see blogs as a distasteful and anarchic sewer, where uncredentialed and irresponsible people who are totally unqualified to articulate opinions are running around spewing all sorts of uninformed trash. And these jouranlistic gate-keepers become especially angry when blogospheric criticism is directed towards other establishment journalists, who previously were immune from any real public accountability.
"Many." Here's a media critic's first lesson: "many" is a warning flag, a dodge, the most obvious and troubling sign of a trend piece. Many is not a percentage and it's not a list of names, it's an assumption masked as a measurement. And the next step for "many" is to become one: a singular (or single digit) example touted as an oft-replicated template. In this case, the lucky winner is TNR's Jason Zengerle (who, to be clear, I've never met, spoken to, or otherwise communicated with), who furnishes Greenwald's exhibit A:
