Gotta get me one o'them intarweb globber thingies

("Intarweb thingie" copyright (c) 2004 Mary Ann Johanson)



Alas, being a latecomer to this particular party, largely due to other intarweb commitments, such as this and this and a much-needed rework of this, and involvement in the Dean campaign early on to focus my rage, in addition to being far too old for this sort of thing, today's New York Times Magazine article about bloggers doesn't include me. It is, however, somewhat disconcerting, and indicates that I am either too cool for words or am spending far too much time reading blogs, that I am a regular reader of every left-of-center blog mentioned and am therefore familiar with all the names mentioned.



Aside from the author's obvious lubriciousness at spending time with Wonkette, compared to the regular-guy earnestness of the blogmales profiled, and an unfortunate accreditation of the odious Mickey Kaus as being some kind of Godfather of Blogging, it's not a bad piece. However, I'll leave it to folks like Steve Gilliard to do a more accurate deconstruction than I'm qualified to do.



Those of you who actually watch the Sunday morning version of Good Morning America were treated to a gee-whiz-bang-what'll-they-think-of-next introduction to them globber thingies that are popping up all over the on that intarweb. It was quite a hoot, even if there were some glaring mistakes, such as:

Earlier, during the Republican convention in New York, a Republican congressman decided to drop his bid for re-election after a blog suggested he was gay.

Said blog didn't just suggest that Virginia Congressman Ed Schrock is gay, Raw Story actually has posted on its site the recording of a phone call the anti-gay Congressman made to a phone sex service. Transcript here.



Another example of the story playing fast and loose with the facts is the claim that:

This past week, bloggers pushed hard on the story about controversial documents uncovered by CBS that spoke to President Bush's National Guard service. Many analysts believe all the talk on Weblogs played a part in forcing CBS to re-examine the issue and ultimately issue a statement.

First of all, Free Republic is hardly a blog, and second of all, Harry MacDougald (code name "Fuckhead"....I mean "Buckhead"), who posted his infamous font post on Free Republic a mere four hours after the 60 Minutes 2 story about the Killian memos, is hardly a blogger. He is, in fact, a conservative attorney, as revealed by the Los Angeles Times on September 18, who was instrumental in the disbarment of President Clinton and who is a mucky-muck in various conservative causes.



Once again, mainstream journalism gets it wrong.