For The First and Last Time, With Feeling

The Koufax awards were announced today, and you will be forgiven for having no idea what they are. They are the blogging world’s equivalent of the Oscars or the Grammys. And now it can be admitted that there is an award for every channel of human industry ever conceived and exercised. Can there be any doubt that there are now small gold statuettes on shelves somewhere celebrating the best stamp collection, sausage making, shoe tying, rope jumping, sign painting, phone answering, carpet cleaning, bottle washing, newsprint recycling, and commercial broadcasting? And the best new anonymous grafitti left with a pencil over the urinal in the men’s room goes to… the guy who keeps writing “BJ” wherever he micturates.

We don’t want to dismiss the Koufax awards. But we do want to finally and conclusively clarify something, and we’re afraid we’re going to have to raise our voices a little to do it: BLOGGING IS NOT JOURNALISM. STOP EQUATING THE TWO, AND STOP GIVING THESE “BLOGGING” PEOPLE ACCESS TO THE “MSM” WHICH THEY ARE CONSTANTLY RAVING ABOUT. At the very least, make sure you permanently dismiss one pundit for every blogger you hire.

And another thing: Get Frank Rich on the Op-Ed page, or fire him. We’re half convinced that global warming is a result of all the hot air being emitted by self-evident experts in all quarters. In a newspaper, particularly one that aspires to be the paper of recrod, opinion belongs on the opinion page. Even if we agree with Rich, which we do with alarming regularity, we still don’t much appreciate the ammunition he—and a hundred other professional soap-boxers—have given to all the belligerant wingnuts who have managed to spread skepticism about the world’s authoritative news sources because they cannot or will not see the difference between one person’s beliefs and another’s reported observations and sourced quotes. Ever noticed how National Public Radio does not broadcast any opinion—except as rare, carefully isolated, and identified “commentaries”?

Blogging is criticism, it is cross-referencing and self-referencing, it is exegesis, and it is frequently a form of over-amplified soap-boxing. It does not typically involve any reporting, and if it does, it instantly stops being a blog and becomes a news dispatch. The only blogs that qualify even remotely as journalism are blogs that involve a writer getting off his or her duff, observing real-world incidents and interviewing real-world people, recording the results of this information gathering, and submitting the results to a skeptical editor whose job it is to make sure you’re not making any of it up or picking any private fights. Reading another persons’ news reports or blogs does not qualify as reporting. It qualifies as criticism and opinion, and in rare cases, entertainment.

Okay, with that now clear, we can point you to some further refinements, from one of the big, deserving winners in this year’s Koufax awards, Digby. As he makes clear, people have been expressing themselves and their sordid opinions since they first started scratching burnt bones against blank cave walls. What is different and interesting and maddening about this modern medium is the spontaneous regeneration and retransmission of response and riposte from tens of thousands of readers. That is all. That is a big deal, relatively speaking, but that is all.