You know, part of me wants to say “Amen” to Joseph Rago’s tirade. The other part of me wants to Rochambeau him.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of awful blogs out there. He’s right. But awful is in the eye of the beholder, and there’s some great work being done in the blogosphere as well. I might not like the pomposity and egos of some bloggers, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the information they’re imparting.

Jim: Hmm. I’m reminded of Sturgeon’s Revelation, which Instapundit mentions now and then. Asked about low-quality science fiction writing, the author said, “Yes, 90 percent of sci-fi is crap. But 90 percent of anything is crap.” Rago writes:

Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage.

Accurate. However, a lot of bloggers don’t really want to replace the reporters of the world. They want to replace the opiners of the world, who have, sad to say, the real fame. (Quick quiz to illustrate: How many New York Times reporters can you name? Now how many of their regular columnists? How about with the Post, or any other paper?)

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

Largely accurate. But it’s worth noting that A) the readers of those blogs don’t mind B) and if you don’t like the tone or style of a blog, then don’t read it. A blog reader always has the option of reading another blog; in many towns, there’s only one major newspaper. Skipping down a bit…

Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought–instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition.

He’s right. You don’t see that kind of behavior in the print media, or TV, or… MACACA! MARK FOLEY! WE FOUND THE KILLER OF JONBENET RAMSEY! NO, WAIT, WE DIDN’T! DUKE STUDENTS RAPED A STRIPPER! NO, WAIT, NEVERMIND! BEWARE OF E. COLI! HERE’S AN UPDATE ON THE MISSING BLONDE IN ARUBA! Er, sorry, that just slipped out. Where was I?

The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

Eh… One man’s mob is the other man’s party. And note we’re talking about virtual mobs; nobody, as far as I know, has actually gotten offline and collected pitchforks and torches and stormed a castle.

This cross-referential and interactive arrangement, in theory, should allow for some resolution to divisive issues, with the market sorting out the vagaries of individual analysis. Not in practice. The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren’t. The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.

This is perhaps the most intriguing, and accurate assessment in the column. But I don’t think it’s the fault of the medium of blogging. I think it’s the fault of… well, us. Most of us like reading people we agree with. Most of us don’t like reading people we disagree with. I try to read a lot of different views, but I grind my teeth the moment I get the feeling that somebody I’m reading looks down on me, or thinks that I could only hold my views as a result of ignorance or moral deviancy.

It’s not just on the blog world. Take a look at the political section of your local bookstore these days. Take a listen to a great deal of talk radio. Heck, even when a newspaper runs Maureen Dowd and David Brooks on the same page, it’s not like Brooks and Dowd are interacting with each other.

Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions–John Kerry always providing useful material–while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq.

Okay, let’s see some evidence, Mr. Rago. I’d like to see what blogs you read that informed your opinion. Do we sometimes enjoy poking fun at John Kerry too often? Maybe. But I don’t think Iraq has been underexamined. But maybe I’m reading different right leaning blogs.

This is one of the problems of pieces that praise or denounce “blogs” in their entirety, as the variety of blogs is about as diverse as people themselves.

Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.

Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.

I grok your lingo, kemo sabe. I went into journalism because I wanted it to be better – that it didn’t have to be just the salaciousness of the old-school Geraldo Rivera and the O.J. Simpson Trial. Compare a Time magazine from a couple decades back to a Time magazine from today – it’s like comparing… well, the Wall Street Journal to USA Today. Lighter, fluffier, less hard news and less detail. There was a time when large chunks of society picked up newspapers and magazines, and/or watched Tom, Dan, and Peter, because the news said “THIS IS IMPORTANT. And you can trust us.” And when we look back on the journalism of not so long ago – the Iranian hostage crisis (that launched Nightline), the assassination attempt on President Reagan, the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Persian Gulf War – we don’t remember “fake but accurate.” We don’t remember ridiculous spin, or sneering, or sources that couldn’t be found. (When it did happen, like with Janet Cooke, it was a big deal, and those involved fell on their swords – they didn’t blame conspiracies and political enemies.)

But I think we’ll get closer to that informative, fair, straightforward news environment we want to see by just keeping our heads down and doing our jobs, not with MSM op-ed pieces pointing out blogs’ flaws, and bloggers reacting by pointing out MSM flaws. This argument has been pretty well hashed-out since 2004.