"Journalists" vs. bloggers: a case of sour grapes

Via Atrios comes Matt Taibbi's smackdown of Andrew Sullivan in particular, and the nattering nabobs of nasty in the mainstream media in general, in New York Press (emphases mine):

On the Internet, a volunteer army of bloggers escalated their guerrilla war against the mainstream media… Nevertheless, they stay on the margins—because, like all insurgents, they're about sniping, not governing. —Andrew Sullivan, in Time's "Person of the Year" issue



[snip]



Sullivan is trying to compare bloggers to the Iraqi insurgency—a wrongheaded and unfair comparison to begin with, one that outrages both parties—but the way he writes it, he implies that the real media's natural role is to govern. In the shaky parallel structure of this sentence, bloggers and guerrilla insurgents make up one pair, while mainstream media and legitimate ruling government make up the other.



It's a very odd thing, watching the reaction of the so-called mainstream media to the phenomenon of blogs. The response is almost universally one of total disdain and disgust, but the stated reasons vary.



An argument I see sometimes and occasionally even agree with is that bloggers don't have the same factual and ethical standards that the mainstream media supposedly has, which leads to such fiascoes as the bogus Kerry-mistress story sweeping the country, or the name of Kobe's accuser being made public.



But more often than not, the gripe about bloggers isn't that they're unethical. It's that they're small. In the minds of people like Sullivan, not being part of a big structure intrinsically degrades the amateur, makes him a member of a separate and lower class; whereas in fact the solidarity of any journalist should always lie with the blogger before it lies with, say, the president. Journalists are all on the same side, or ought to be, anyway.



[snip]



Not Time magazine, though. Time lay with the president. Time big-time lay with the president. What was great about Sullivan's "Year of the Insurgents" column last week was how beautifully it threw the rest of the "Person of the Year" issue into contrast. Here's Sullivan bitching about bloggers needing to stay on the margins where they belong; meanwhile, his "respectable" media company is joyously prancing back and forth along 190 glossy pages with George Bush's cock wedged firmly in its mouth.

A ghastly, disturbing, and disgusting image, to be sure...But don't let that keep you from reading the full article.