In his column on bloggers, Joe Klein certainly paid me a nice compliment, and I'm very appreciative for it. His column, though, reminded me of something Jack Shafer once wrote: "The traffic generated by [pieces about pets] makes possible the publication of poorly performing columns about the press."
To step aside from the concerns about the content of the sites Klein dislikes (I'm a fan of Atrios, DailyKos, et al, but that argument has been had already), they also serve a secondary purpose in subsidizing "the smart stuff" Klein likes. In much the way that cover stories on back pain and, in this case, "the Science of Appetite," sustain the readership and subscription numbers necessary for Klein's wonkier work and the magazine's political and international reporting, the red meat provided by the sites Klein decries create the audience and infrastructure that sustains and, more to the point, publicizes, my health care writing, or Juan Cole's Iraq reporting.
Us wonks, I fear, are slightly parasitic. Without DailyKos, and Atrios, and CrooksandLiars, I doubt there'd be an EzraKlein.com. Sad as it is, most folks don't approach politics in quite the way I do, and were the media landscape merely a thousand replications of my writing, no one would tune in. Politics is tribal, and messy, and decidedly un-Platonic, and the wonky, number-intensive stuff I do here can only survive so long as the larger audience's attention is retained by those who speak more to the passions of politics than the policies.
