2/26/2005 04:33:00 PM|||Nathan Moore|||

Or just plain silly. Ted Rall's latest column, which amounts to nothing more than a hit piece on bloggers, is up here. I find it peculiar that a medium made up of distinctly individual actors, who are interested citizens writing for the joy of it, are slammed as, and I paraphrase, drunk, mean and working for the "bad guys". Bloggers are not journalists, and thus are not qualified to comment on events as they see them.

What??

I'm not sure what powers Mr. Rall attributes to the blogosphere. He seems perturbed that there are thousands of attentive eyes outside the monolith of the mainstream media. Why this is bad is unclear, save that blogs have a habit of negatively affecting institutions that do great work in advancing Rall's ideological agenda. But don't tell Rall that.

The theme of his complaint is that "no one is watching the watchers", which is an age-old question, even one contemplated by the Founders when deciding on the proper checks and balances to constrain the newly created federal government. However, the question as applied to the blogosphere is, in a way, inane.

The "watchers", which worry Rall so much, are private citizens taking the time to write their observations and thoughts, who thanks to advancements in technology now have a cost-effective way of doing so. It's also made possible by this thing called freedom (maybe Rall's heard of it?), delineated in the First Amendment, and is to be found in every state constitution in the union. If bloggers are wrong, or incorrect, they will be called out as such...by the rest of the blogosphere. If it weren't such a pride-swallowing exercise, Old Media could do it, too. The entire enterprise of blogs, though each are an individual, do move as an aggregate, and are self-checking. This is not an attribute that can be claimed by big media. And if Rall thinks that a community that detected at CBS the biggest fraud in big journalism is a bad thing, we must look deeper for his true motives.

I also find it amusing that Rall has more supporting information for Eason Jordan's allagations against American troops than even Eason Jordan did. Funny, I think. And suspect.

I never paid much attention to Rall. I found him to be a talented illustrator but all-to-typically blind to reality, as is the case with most who are artistically inclined. I now find him utterly pathetic.

|||110945851171980472|||Inane