Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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Argh. Recall this post on The Kerry Spot, December 15:

Ready for a really awful, only-the-hackneyed-mainstream-media-could-think-of-it idea?

Picture on one side of the cover, Abu Zarqawi and a collage of all the masked, hostage-murdering thugs and scum in Iraq. Then, on the other side, selected members of the Pajamahadeen, guys like Powerline, Instapundit, LGF, Captain‘s Quarters, RCP… (*Sigh*, and Wonkette, stuck in there too because of the unwritten law that every mainstream media story on bloggers has to feature her potty-mouth humor front and center.)

The insulting and tasteless headline: “Insurgents of the Year.”

Andrew Sullivan, in Time magazine, the Dec. 27, 2004 issue:

Year of the Insurgents

One word brought together the disparate events of 2004: insurgency. It's a strange term — but we've got quite used to it. Think of it as not quite a revolution but more than mere discontent. The dictionary describes it as "a condition of revolt against a recognized government that does not reach the proportions of an organized revolutionary government." Yep, a war that is not a real war, a halfway, inconclusive revolt without end, a battle of attrition that polarizes as it goes essentially nowhere.

In Iraq it had a literal meaning. Each month the number of attacks on coalition troops went up, after a wildfire revolt in the spring. Slowly, sovereignty shifted toward the Iraqis, but just as slowly, attempts to eliminate resistance seemed merely to move it around. Even after the climactic battle to retake Fallujah in November, violence spiked in Mosul and Baghdad. Progress in reconstruction and political engagement is now measurable. Smart observers see flickers of hope in the possibility of elections next month. But the insurgents remain — increasingly organized, angry, yet still distant from any semblance of real power...

Others weren't so easily co-opted. On the Internet, a volunteer army of bloggers escalated their guerrilla war against the mainstream media. They had previously spooked the (now former) executive editor of theNew York Times Howell Raines and even the (just as former) Senate majority leader Trent Lott, but when they helped push Dan Rather into early retirement, their real moment seemed to have come. Nevertheless, they stay on the margins — because, like all insurgents, they're about sniping, not governing.

The next time Sullivan refers to the Daily Dish as one of the leading blogs and a quintessential example of the genre, recall that he also dismisses bloggers as being merely “about sniping,” not governing. (Hey, I wonder if he’ll feature that particular quote during Pledge Week?)

Hey, here’s a crazy thought: What if bloggers are the real-time, more-accountable corrections desk of a mainstream media that has forgotten job one, which is getting the story right? Does that still count as ‘sniping’? And since when is the capacity to ‘govern’ the measuring stick of a blog? What the heck does that actually mean? How is any web site supposed to ‘govern,’ say, the New York Times front page?

Does anyone else smell a hastily-thrown-together anti-blog argument jammed into this piece to cater to the sensibilities of editors of a mainstream media print magazine?

[Posted 12/20 09:54 AM]