What is a Blogger?

Besides a parasite on the American body politic. What, that is not the vibe given off by some of the reaction to the Eason Jordan affair by the journalistic establishment? Alas, that means it is time for another episode of What Shall We Do with the Bloggers?

Except that Nicholas Lehman's New Yorker piece actually has a few indications that big time editors are starting to get the message, that conservatives really do have some reason to feel marginalized by the coverage they get as something less than "three-dimensional humans."

But then the Chicago Tribune's James Warren goes and blows it all to hell with an extremely telling little riff he lays on Lehman:

"There is a consensus in newsrooms, and it's distinctly left of center. I suspect an overriding majority of the newsroom voted for Kerry–though up on the executive floor, a majority voted for Bush. But people don't realize the huge amount of content out there that's pretty value-free." He picked up the Metro section of that day's Tribune and showed me the front page. "Look at this! I'm not sure how ideology plays into the governor closing a dump. … [The critics] don't realize that ninety-nine per cent of folks in journalism aren't opining or covering the White House."

Well, Jim in that particular dump-closing case Illinois's dysfunctional, incestuous politics was surely at work. Yay, you.

However, a rigid zero-risk, environmental ideology has driven such dump-closing decisions in many cities across the country. Recycling? Ideology. Three-guesses how critically recycling is covered by most papers. News judgment about what constitutes a story is not value-free, it cannot be. Bloggers see what is on the front page and ask why, why nothing about this Jordan guy in Davos? Warren's blind-spot here is huge.

Further it is just madness to suggest that dissatisfaction with the mainstream media is a top-down affair. If it were, the Tulsa World would not be trying to invent copyright law on the fly to muzzle a software engineer. In fact, local issues inflame and drive public opinion in community after community, and critics of the dominant media voices in those communities know damn well the White House does not enter into it.