Blogging is not a science and it is not a professional guild. Anyone can do it — which is the best and worst thing about blogs after all. For an example of really poor blogging we have this installment from TAPPED:
VERDICT: NOT GUILTY. The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed-page editor, Paul Gigot, recently went out to solicit a letter of support for the Bush administration from eight European leaders, which was then published on the op-ed page. He then apparently got the Journal to cover the letter as a news story. Pressed as to whether or not this was crossing the line between opinioneering and William Randolph Hearst-ish, you-furnish-the-pictures-and-I’ll-furnish-the-war politicking, Gigot replied: “We’ve committed news and I plead guilty to practicing journalism.”
If so, journalism is in worse shape today than Tapped thought. We’re not sure exactly how to define “journalist,” but we do know one when we see one. Gigot is a journalist like Zell Miller is a Democrat: in name only. He is, more accurately, a hack, an apologist and a purveyor of propaganda.
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The reason this is so lame, as if you couldn’t tell, is not that they call Gigot “a hack, an apologist and a purveyor of propanda.” Though that is transparently stupid (I thought Gigot’s old “Potomac Watch” was one of the best reported columns in America). What’s so lame is that they provide no evidence and no argument. They simply bang their spoons on their high-chairs without giving the reader any reason to join them in their conclusions. Maybe what Gigot did was wrong — frankly I don’t see it at all. That letter was, in fact, news. Right? When Tom Friedman of the New York Times got the Saudis to offer their “peace plan” through his column, the Times covered it as news. Was the Times spreading propaganda? Maybe TAPPED thinks so (though I doubt it). But if they do, they should mention that. In other words, make an argument fellas, because you sound hysterical, shabby, and more than a little arrogant when you assume smart people will share your conclusions when you give them no reason to.