James Wolcott: “I invented the blogosphere.”

10:03 pm, 9/28/04

James Wolcott: "I invented the blogosphere."
Remember James Wolcott, the twit who cheers for hurricanes? Now Salon is trying to claim he inspired us.

The blogs terrorizing Dan Rather and CBS the past couple of weeks represent only a small part of the Internet media devoted to criticizing other media, particularly TV and print journalists. Whether they realize it or not, many of these armchair mediaphiles have been heavily influenced by James Wolcott, whose cultural criticism appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's and Esquire before settling in Vanity Fair, where he is the culture critic.

Apparently, he's a leading media critic among Manhattan's ample supply of limousine liberals, which would explain why his blog seems totally incoherent to anyone outside Manhattan.

Yet... Salon still sees fit to give him half of an interview about it, where he pontificates broadly about the blogosphere despite having been part of it for less than a month. The other half is devoted to his theory that the media needs to be much, much more liberal. (Did you know that the New Republic is racist because they're dismissive of Al Sharpton? It's true! He may be a looney, but he's black, so gosh darnit, they should pay attention to him!)

The blogosphere (with the exception of Wonkette, I suspect) has been about as influenced by the Manhattan establishment as James Carville has been influenced by Rogaine commercials, and that goes for both the left and the right. Indeed, many bloggers didn't know Wolcott existed until many were sickened by his sing-song interpretation of the death of the Columbia shuttle astronauts as an anti-Bush omen. (Most, I'd imagine, still don't know he exists, or care.) I started to go into a lengthy study of Wolcott, the interview, and his blog, but I won't. I'll just leave it at this: The liberal commentators of the old media live in an abstract world, a fault that you cannot even attribute to the likes of leftist bloggers like Atrios or Oliver Willis, who, like the rest of us, are trying to analyze real situations that involve real people. (Whether they've got it right or wrong is an entirely seperate discussion.)

Wolcott's blog focuses on such topics as which Hollywood directors wear ascots and David Farina's hair, the way the Bush family hugs, but yet still manages to lace in sidelong references to Abu Ghraib, add "Fahrenheit 9/11" to his movie list, and act as though he were politically astute. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. He's a big boy, and this is how he wants to spend his life. What is disturbing is that Salon can justify acting as though Wolcott launching his blog is some sort of watershed event, and treating a man who's been running it for all of about 4 weeks as any sort of expert source on the blogosphere.

It fits a pattern: Last week, the New York Times did a Sunday Magazine article on bloggers. Why not, blogs are making news, right? Conservative blogs launched a bloody coup that has wrecked CBS Evening News' ratings, a very concrete thing, that. Powerline, LittleGreenFootballs, AllahPundit, INDCJournal only uncovered a deliberate fraud intended to bring down the leader of the most powerful nation in the history of mankind. That's news, don't you think? So, what does the New York Times have to say?

Why, we get a fawning, ten page idolization of DailyKos, Wonkette, and similar far-left blogs, of course. Kos, who is only really noted in the blogosphere for having said "screw them" regarding the murder and mutilation of four contractors in Fallujah, is portrayed as some kind of hero slumped in a corner digging up "the goods" on Bob Novak. Wonkette, on the other hand, is noted almost exclusiveley for sex jokes. No discussion of the events and people that have actually brought blogs into the public eye in the first place. This, however, is what I found most telling:

The news media helped create the modern campaign, and now they seem to be stuck in it. The bloggers, by contrast, adapted quickly. By the time the Republican convention rolled around in August, they had figured something out, staying far, far away from that zoo down at Madison Square Garden. They had begun to work the way news people do at manufactured news events, by sticking together, sharing information, repeating one another's best lines.

Translation: "These bloggers have stooped to our level, so they don't concern us, and we will now show them to you." Others don't even pretend. Instead, they go on the attack, with Dan Rather smearing the blogosphere as a "professional rumor mill", and Steven Levy calling us a "nation of ankle-biters".

I don't think blogs scare "real" journalists, because journalists are, in the end, in the wholesale business. They round up the news, and sell it back to the consumer outlet. However, blogs do scare folks like the New York Times and Salon, and conservative blogs terrify them. Every time blogs edge into the mainstream, they lose another piece of their elitist monopoly on public discourse, on professional wordsmithing, and when it's to conservative blogs, they lose a piece of their monopoly to people diametrically opposed to their ideology. As Wolcott put it,

What I think is so fantastic [about blogs] is that there is so much more talent and braininess out in the country than you would know from just reading magazines.

Indeed. In many ways, the Scotsman newspaper had it right when they compared the blogosphere to 18th-century pamphleteering. Without it, few would've known that they weren't the only people quietly pondering an uprising against the British Empire.

Unbelievably, that was the short version. I guess, though, that you know your new medium has reached the big time when all the has-beens and losers from the old ones are trying to claim responsibility for it.

Update: In comments, the awesomely awesome Jim Treacher suggests that "fawning idolization" might be missing the point, and links to this analysis as evidence. That could well be. I took the snarkiness and condescension in the piece to be part of the normal arrogance at the New York Times. In either case, it was as much publicity as any bloggers get, whether it made them look glamorous or not, and it portrayed the blogosphere (which has only recently struck the media) as being a dominantly leftwing affair. If it was a hit piece on the blogosphere as a whole, that just proves the point about the media's attitude, but it certainly simultaneously demonstrates that they're only barely willing to admit that a conservative side exists at all.