1) So is this FAQ prompted by that Opinion Journal piece by Joseph Rago that slammed the blogosphere this past Wednesday?

I cannot tell a lie. It is. Originally, I had no intention to write about the piece. I received a ton of letters asking me to respond to it, but I had no real interest in doing so. As I told my correspondents, there are a lot of people saying schmucky things out there, and only so many hours in the day.

2) So why the change of heart?

Two things. First, Pajamas Media put up the report of the Sandy Berger incident, an act that belied Rago’s thesis that blogs are incapable of original reporting and “instead….ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks.” Next, the Iowa Hawk published his instantly famous parody of the Rago article which justly mocked overwrought and pretentious metaphors like “remora fish on the bellies of sharks.”

3) That is kind of a strained metaphor. But big deal. It’s not like he has the exclusive franchise on bad writing.

No, he doesn’t. There are bountiful examples of bad writing in and on newspapers, magazines, books, billboards, restroom walls and yes, the blogosphere. Where Rago missteps is he mean-spiritedly dismisses the quality of all the writing in the blogosphere without offering any examples. He also lacked the generosity and fairness to offer some obvious counter-examples. For instance, James Lileks could pound away at his Mac for a hundred years and still never puke out a metaphor as execrable as the “remora fish” one.

4) Did you take the article personally?

Well, it was tough not to. This passage obviously hit close to home:

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

(The ellipsis, for no apparent reason, was in the original.)

5) Sounds like something’s bugging young Rago. What could it be? At a still-tender age, he has climbed to the pinnacle of the journalistic world and is already an “assistant editorial features editor” at the Wall Street Journal. Shouldn’t he be happy rather than angrily lashing out at unnamed antagonists?

He should be. And the angry lashing-out is what made his piece so disquietingly odd. Rago may be a prince of a guy (although based on his article “prince” might be a couple of letters off), and any effort I make to analyze Rago’s psyche would rest on a foundation of ignorance. But as Rago himself would point out, that’s never stopped a blogger before!

I think this article Rago wrote a couple of years ago in the Dartmouth Review is instructive. It features the exact same pettiness that he showed on the Journal’s website. For some reason, a couple of his fellow undergrads who were making names for themselves got under Rago’s skin. So he attacked.

6) Cut the kid some slack. He’s young.

True. And when I was his age, I was napping my way through law school stirring only to lift weights, play racquetball and chase women that I never caught. But there are other people Rago’s age who write publicly without embarrassing themselves. On the left, Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein have distinguished themselves as talented writers and thoughtful individuals. On the right, Duncan Currie and Sonny Bunch have done the same. For what it’s worth, the first two also blog and do so with a high level of skill.

7) Okay, on to the blogosphere in general. What’s the level of writing there?

Terrible. Really rotten. Seriously. But if Oliver Willis is the norm, there are numerous exceptions. Charles Johnson’s Little Green Footballs is extremely well put-together and has educated its huge audience on the day’s most important topic. Ace, Allah and Mary Katherine are all fantastic. So too are Captain Ed and the Powerliners. Glenn Reynolds is the blogfather – need I say more? Lileks is brilliant. The writing at the Corner is always stimulating. Geraghty is indeed indispensable. The American Prospect’s Blog is a great read. The guy at Balloon Juice who hates me so much is nevertheless funny, entertaining and sporadically insightful. Even at the Daily Kos, some front-pagers like Bill from Portland Maine are skillful commentators. There are many more outstanding blogs, and I hope no one feels slighted because I’m not mentioning them all.

8) But it is a legitimate criticism that blogs piggy-back on the original reporting of the newspapers, is it not?

No, it isn’t. And this is the part that the old-media’s diehard dead-enders refuse to get. I don’t mean to say that Rago comes across as a fanatical defender of the old media, but it wouldn’t surprise me if twenty years from now he wandered off an island near Okinawa clutching a picture of the Emperor and a tattered copy of the Wall Street Journal.

9) Aaah, cringe inducing humor. Love it! But what do you mean? Are you suggesting that blogs do actual reporting?

The answer is a bit more subtle than the question that you’re asking. For most matters of import, the information is just out there. For instance, if Rahm Emmanuel issues a statement on the Foley instant messages, everyone has access to that raw material, bloggers and mainstream media reporters alike. The same goes for a statement from Tehran or battlefield statistics from the Anbar province.

Again, the information is out there. And that’s what’s killing the newspapers. When’s the last time you read a headline in the New York Times about something you cared about and said to yourself, “Wow. I didn’t know that.” For high end news gatherers, newspapers provide a summary of stuff they already knew.

10) But let’s say there’s a big accident on Route 128. The Boston Globe will send a reporter and get the story. That’s reporting! And it’s the kind of thing that blogs don’t do.

It’s also the kind of thing that most people don’t care about. As far as doing the kind of reporting that people care about, gathering press releases in Iraq’s Green Zone isn’t exactly the stuff of legend.

11) Aren’t you being a little unfair to the big boys?

No. People have no idea how flimsy a construct the mainstream media is. The Boston Globe, for instance, has a so-called Middle East bureau. Any Globies out there can correct me if I get this wrong, but I’m pretty sure the Globe’s “Middle East bureau” is one guy working out of Tel Aviv.

12) So what’s the point?

That the big boys, generally speaking, aren’t gathering any more raw information than is generally available to the public by downloading press releases and watching cable news.

13) But there are exceptions. For instance, in spite of the moral depravity involved, the Times’ ongoing release of classified documents does show you they’re wearing out some shoe-leather.

True. But the blogosphere has similar exceptions. Michael Yon and Bill Roggio not only embed themselves with the military, but they actually understand the way the military functions much better than the typical reporter. To put it mildly.

Which brings us to another advantage present in some quadrants of the blogosphere. If you want an analysis of raw news coming from Iran, Michael Ledeen is likely to give you a better and more knowing one than, say, Joseph Rago. If you want to know whether the military should expand, Thomas P.M. Barnett will bring a lot more experience and wisdom to the debate than, say, Joseph Rago.

14) But that doesn’t mean the Mainstream media is useless, does it?

Of course not. There’s some great stuff in virtually every major American newspaper. There’s also some dreadful stuff and a whole lot of second-hand stuff. But dismissing the entire mainstream media because of its flaws would be simplistic. I would go so far as to call doing such a thing Rago-esque.

Comments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.