Are we making a difference? George Packer thinks we are – but need to do more original reporting. Money quote:
Many bloggers emerged from the ranks of the press itself; unlike the elite press corps, though, anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can blog. This is potentially the most radical innovation of the form: It opens up political journalism to a vast marketplace of competitors, reminiscent of earlier ages of pamphleteering. It also restores unvarnished opinion, for better and worse, to a central place in political writing. Insult and invective were the stock-in-trade of the English political essayists of the 18th century, and of their American counterparts during the early years of the republic (when bimbo eruptions made their first appearance in press coverage of presidential campaigns). The explosion of blogs has blown a needed hole in the sealed rooms of the major editorial pages and the Sunday talk shows. It has also affected political reporting, by forcing Washington journalists accustomed to the caution of the mainstream to follow less traveled tributaries – for example, the examination of President Bush’s National Guard service was partly pushed along by evidence laid out for reporters by Calpundit.
Yes: pamphleteering. And why not?
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “The line that struck me as most interesting in that piece from the embedded CNN reporter is near the end where he writes ‘So it’s been surprising’. I would love for him to further explain why he finds the actions & attitudes of these men ‘surprising’. I would take a guess & say that this is this man’s first exposure to our men in the military.
I was an Army brat from the day I was born until I was halfway through college, and my father was an Airborne ranger most of those years. This reporter’s observations of our soldiers don’t surprise me at all. Anyone who has spent anytime around our soldiers would not have expected anything different. These men take their code and their duty seriously. The fact that the reporter is ‘surprised’ I think reveals more than anything his (and no doubt a significant number of media people’s) disconnect from what most people know, either first hand or instinctively, about our military personnel. We have the best military known to mankind and one of the primary reasons is the simplest one: The people who are in it.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.
THOM GUNN DIES: A difficult but, at times, I’ve found a rewarding poet. In this typically rich and arch Daily Telegraph obituary, you find two other details: he met his husband, Mike Kitay, at Oxford in the early 1950s. Kitay survived him.
The Dish 