Joseph Rago, WSJ: Blogs Suck! Jeez, What a Grump!

In a pompous editorial today, Joseph Rago at the Wall St Journal rags on blogs as unjournalistic mobs. And he certainly has a mob of bloggers on his ass now because of it. Jeez, what a fatuous (to use one of his favorite words) grump he is.

Rago uses the words logorrheic and solipsistic in the same sentence. He throws in "valorizes", "a coagulant for orthodoxies", "vastation", "fatuities" and "fatuity" in the same sentence; "ancien régime," "reductive habits." And yet he has the balls to call political bloggers "excruciatingly boring."

And WTF? Doesn't this guy have an editor?

"Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either." Huh?

"Journalism," whines Rago, "requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers... ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps." And blah, blah, blog, he goes on. And on. Very entertaining.

Steve Rubel suggests that bloggers stop reading the Journal. That's endearing, but it seems a bit over the top. I like the Wall St. Journal. My cat likes me to put cat nip on it so he can roll around in it.

artwork by Canuckflack

To be fair, the Editorial and Op-Ed section is editorially distinct from the news sections (not that they have been the great embracers either).

I find this kind of behavior typical for that page.

But Rubel, don't go all Bill O'Reilly on us with a useless boycott-- if I want to read Mossberg, I'm gonna (of course, I never read the editorial page anyway-- too out of touch with my version of reality and this just proves it)

Thanks for reading it so I don't have to, B.L.

The appeal of blogs, at least to me, is that you know you are getting opinion.

In the EIGHTH paragraph Rago says "here's my opinion" -- as if the rest of his self-righteous piece was anything but.