Austin Bay Blog

Hat tip powerline. The Washington Post’s Jim Brady learns that the internet’s “blog world” consists of many different people with differing talents, points of view, agendas, and concepts of civility.

A turning point in Brady’s digital experience:

My career as a nitwitted, emasculated fascist began the afternoon of Jan. 19 when, as executive editor of the Post’s Web site, washingtonpost.com, I closed down the comments area of one of our many blogs, one called post.blog. Created primarily to announce new features on the Web site, the blog had become ground zero for angry readers complaining about a column by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell on the newspaper’s coverage of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. If I had let them, they would have obliterated any semblance of civil, genuine discussion.

Insight blooms within the Beltway:

Personally, I don’t believe there’s any such thing as “the blogosphere” as opposed to “the mainstream media.” It’s silly to assign organizations to one category or the other, pretend that there’s uniformity in either grouping, or imagine a battle between the two. According to Technorati, a search engine that tracks the blogosphere, there are 27.6 million blogs on the Web, and they cover countless topics. Blogs are at odds with each other just as often as they’re at odds with the media. Similarly, there are thousands of traditional media organizations in this country — newspapers, TV stations, radio stations and magazines, most with their own Web sites. And anyone who has ever worked at one of them can testify that the media is not one big happy family. We’re extremely opinionated about what our fellow journalists do. And it’s impossible to say that either blogs or the mainstream media share one philosophy.

Even if you could define the blogosphere and the media as discrete entities, I’ve never understood why they’d be viewed as competitors. If you want to be positive, you could say blogs and the traditional media have a symbiotic relationship; if you want to be more negative, call it parasitic. Either way, they’re connected. They co-exist like this: The media writes articles or files reports, then blogs use them as starting points for discussions. When the blogs do this, they almost always provide links back to media Web sites, and there isn’t a news media site on the Web that doesn’t receive a good chunk of its traffic from blogs. Each entity has an important yet distinct role in this potentially virtuous circle. Blogs don’t have big media’s capacity for expensive, coordinated news-gathering from Baghdad to Biloxi; newspapers and TV networks, even when they dive into the Web, can’t match the (sometimes irresponsible) feistiness and flexibility of the blogs.

I agree. Brady’s post is thoughtful and the voice of “new experience.” From pain a little gain.

The anger tsunamis that struck Brady crash and smash every day, and by the far the worst waves come from the political left. Brady may wish to disagree with that assessment –I don’t know– but his virtual bruises (and the streams of vulgarities that appeared on his website) argue otherwise. I’ve had comment rules from the get-go. America’s contemporary left reminds me of America’s hard right in the 1950s — angry and conspiracy-ridden. Step back from the political tropes and consider the social psychology. The DailyKos combines John Birch Society-type fear and fever with high school trash talk.