Author: Hans Eisenbeis

By now you have heard about the flap over at The New York Press, where editor Jeff Koyen walked the plank for a tasteless feature called “The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope.” The general consensus seems to be that his main transgression was publishing a spectacularly unfunny piece by a writer who is a jackass. We have said it many times before, but no one seems to notice: If you do not care about your subject, it is impossible to be funny about it. This has confused some readers. They have written to ask whether this means one cannot poke fun or be mean in any way, and that is not what we mean. For example, here is a very good example of a pope joke that works, and it does not reflect very well on the pope himself. But if you desconstruct the joke, it is clear what the jokester cares about: social justice and progressivism, which in certain cases is emphatically not what the pope nor the Church are interested in.

The “official” story is that the publisher and owner of the Press were most exercised by Koyen’s “insubordination” in a technical matter. Koyen apparently wished to parody the New York Post at the same time that he made fun of the octogenarian pontiff, and lawyers at the Press apparently trembled at the prospect of landing in court with Rupert Murdoch’s henchmen. It is certainly true that putting yourself in the Australian Sauron’s cross-hairs is normally suicidal. On the other hand, parody is a time-honored protectorate of the fair use doctrine, and Murdoch would look pretty bad putting the Press out of business on an overreach like that. For their part, the publisher and owner don’t seem to care that certain public officials are calling on New Yorkers to break the law by gathering and throwing away any copies of the Press they might find. (This is against the law, and amounts to an abrogation of freedom of the press. It also reminds us of mobs in burlap with pitchforks and torches.) All in all, we have to say probably every last person at the Press, top to bottom, including the publishers and the lawyers, ought to either be fired or publically shamed, and that appears to be what’s happening. What an unadulterated debacle—rather like a runaway car full of egomaniacs who will not stop and ask for directions.

The main problem with the New York Press is not incidental, it is systemic. The Press has no friends in any quarter. We find that it has a hard time caring about any subject, and seems interested mostly in hearing its own voice. As a brilliant friend once said, after we ourselves made a brief appearance as the subject of a Press article, “You don’t necessarily want to read about yourself in the New York Press.” Despite frequent intonations of the holy name of H.L. Mencken, this has never been an asset to anyone, least of all the Press.

We are fans of Russ Smith’s, but this hand-biting legacy is probably down to him, and has been nothing but trouble in the hands of lesser writers and editors. He certainly was able to make a viable business of pure contrarianism, but we worry about his successors. If they are serious about plying new waters with the paper, they really ought to change editorial direction dramatically and make some powerful friends—or else hire Russ Smith’s equal. Koyen’s somewhat juvenile efforts to make the Press “more dangerous” were precisely what the paper did not need—by the sheepish admission of its owners.

In the end, we can all agree that we want the same thing. Simple-minded editors and writers (and publishers and lawyers) need to understand that editorial credibility is absolutely critical. Confusing contrarianism with credibility is an easy thing to do, but it is a deal-breaker. When you are trying to be funny, and trying to care about your subject, but failing at both, your credibility is damaged just as badly as if you wrote nothing but fawning sycophancy on behalf of your advertisers.

We happened to be sharing a table with Star Tribune critic Chris Riemenshneider over the weekend—although we prefer to stay incognito, the better to avoid a punch on the nose for previous infractions and faux pas. Where were we? In the choked air of the Fine Line Music Cafe, after receiving a pair of press tickets for the sold-out show. (God Almighty, please pass that smoking bill. We have smoke-induced glaucoma, and the entire office needs an abatement team after wearing that shirt in doors.) So here is the justification for receiving those freebies: A review of the reviewers.

We recieved our tickets at about the same time that we read Mr. Dylan Hicks’ review of the band, which is the Kings of Leon, a Tennessee quartet whom we happen to like quite a lot. We like Dylan, too—so much so that we still fondly remember things he wrote for us and we are pleased with his recent elevation as an editor—but we rigorously disagree with his crabby prejudice against this band.

We won’t go into a lot of the details, because there aren’t many things that are as boring as rock critics arguing about bands. But we did want to hold these fellows feet to the fire just a little bit.

Dylan, we have to say, kind of stepped in it with last week’s issue of his weekly newspaper. Not only did he trot out that hoary old complaint about this town basically being too white. (It is. This is not news anymore. Besides, the Current plays all kinds of music by black artists—just not a lot of gangsta rap. And they’re not all dead, either! Well, you’ll be able to read all about it this week, no doubt, in the newspaper’s letters from readers.) It’s OK that he failed to see the point of the Kings of Leon (which is their twisted sense of humor and their Dixie-Redneck-in-King-Arthur’s-Court shtick), and it’s even OK that he committed the worst critical sin that can be committed (not at least inferring what the critic DOES care about, which is the only way to innoculate a mean review, with some human sympathy). As it is, a reader might think the critic doesn’t want to admit what it is, precisely, that’s bugging him. You don’t want to give readers a reason to say, “He’s just jealous.” (Overheard from a nearby table.) That’s a bad sign.

Dylan based his critique mostly on the lyrical content of the band’s music, and the quality of the singer’s voice. It is dangerous business relying on even the most audible, legible musicians from their own published lyrics sheets when it is the basis for your critique. But to translate an intentional southern mush-mouth like Caleb Followill is a special risk indeed. The more obvious thing to do is to describe the sound and the overall mood, rather than what the singer is actually saying. But this is a much more difficult job.

You can have the words right and get the critique wrong. Where Dylan hears an angry, cynical, morally bankrupt band, we hear a mirthful, funny, clever, pop-savvy band. (You could make a case that it’s a put-on, without that being necessarily a bad thing—why do you think they call it “show-business”?)

No one likes to be misunderstood, especially when the misunderstanding gets printed one hundred thousand times. Perhaps this is why the Kings back-identified one song in the following way: “That last song was called ‘Dylan Hicks Can Suck My Cock.’” This, by the way, was an unfortunate, juvenile violation of the longstanding rock ‘n’ roll rule never to let anyone know you read your own criticism. But it got a big laugh, and probably made Dylan feel good too.

As for our man from the Star Tribune, we noticed that he tea-totalled during the show, and we find this admirable and slightly depressing, as he scribbled in one of those little reporters’ notebooks that fit into a spacious back pocket. We have no doubt that his views of the show will be considerably more sober than our own, and that’s as it should be. However, through an unfortunate phrasing, he implied that the Kings played material mostly from their first album, whereas we know that the Kings left out only one song from their entire, uh, oeuvre—the beautiful but difficult “Day Old Blues.”

Chris also managed to asperse the band by noting that they have received mixed reviews in other cities during this tour. But we’re not interested in other critics in other cities, and we don’t feel like the band should apologize for playing a tight show here. We know critics rely on other critics, but we wish they wouldn’t admit it. The fact that the Kings have been touring relentlessly since their first record—and that they recently had to forego a tour in Japan due to a bad case of CRSS guitar-elbow—and that they have been selected to warm up U2 on the monstrous Vertigo tour—all these facts kinda mitigate against this idea that the band can’t play live. Now as to the implication that they are taking illicit suppositories, as Reimenschneider seems to say, we can neither confirm nor deny that.

Hey, this is fun—reviewing the reviewers. We really ought to get out more.

Time Out Chicago has finally launched, to lukewarm response from at least one critic. It’s hard to imagine anyone in Chicago getting exercised about a new magazine or newspaper. The city has been so awash with new pubs in the past five years, readers are probably asking themselves what more there is to say about their fair city. As we’ve noted previously, a city that is this overwhelmed with paper stands a fair to middling chance of burning to the ground—don’t laugh, it’s happened before.

We don’t keep a close tab on Chicago anymore, particularly since today there are plenty of outposts here in the Twin Cities that know what Chipico relish is and where to get it and what to put it on. But we are certainly on the record as thinking that the Red editions are both insultingly bad, the venerable paid dailies are visibily confused about what happens next, and the Reader seems to be running away with it. A whole raft of second stringers could bear some scrutiny—from The Onion (can a dissipating humor sheet really be the first national freebie?) to New City to Chicago Social. We intentionally set Chicago magazine aside, because we think it’s good enough to qualify as a publication of national interest—although it is always struggling to emerge from the long shadow cast by Texas Monthly.

So do the Time Out folks have their sights set on any other Great American Cities? Unlikely they’ll look twice at the Twin Cities, for the same old reason—we fall outside the top ten advertising markets, so national advertisers are nearly impossible to reel in here (even though most of them have their advertisements created here). Then again, a chain franchise like Time Out can presumably leverage national ads across all of their titles—but today that is merely New York and Chicago, and given the typical ten-year gap between developing new titles, we so no reason to fear the glacial advance of Time Out, Inc. (Also, we note that this model has hardly been a gold mine for others who are attempting it in a sorta half-assed way. We know precisely what the blockage is, but we ain’t talkin’. That’s called consulting, and we take a fee for that, heh heh.)

More to the point, it is certainly worth pointing out that Time Out hardly has anything to add to any of its chosen American marketplaces—the scene here is lousy with paid and free publications (advantage to the latter), and even worse, the English-speaking world is utterly beset by capsule reviews, arts and entertainment recommendations, and all this interchangeable blurbism. In other wrods, there are so many mousetraps available today, it is only the arrogant and the stupid who insist on bringing new ones to market. (Yes, we know there are four fingers pointing back at us, thank you very much. But we’re not new anymore—we’re three years old!)

So, it is day two of what amounts to a four-day Rosh Hoshanna for Minnesotans; it is the state high school hockey tournament. As threatened, we have set up the office television, stretched the bunny ears across the bookshelf, fiddled with the horizontal and the vertical. We only saw a little of yesterday’s game between Warroad and Albert Lea, such was the struggle to get tuned to the new channel—45 on the UHF.

We’ve been meaning for a while to turn you onto a wonderful new Canadian magazine called The Walrus. Now is a perfect time to do that, because nothing brings Minnesota and Canada closer together than our mutual love for the game of hockey. While Canada may have a stronger claim on the game (having, after all, invented it), by proximity and practice, Minnesota is more or less a provincial extension of Ontario. We like it that way.

In fact, there are two related articles in The Walrus that we wish to bring to your attention: This month’s cover story by Jeremy Rifkin (he’s the fabulous author, by the way, of that book everyone is talking about that describes how Europe will now eclipse the US as a superpower, so we better get used to playing second fiddle) describes a shadowy alliance between Blue State America (that’s us!) and Canada. (Let’s not get too excited. There is an accompanying article titled “Is Canada Fading From the International Stage?” Uh, we’re not sure anyone noticed one way or the other.)

Secondly, last month’s issue had a wonderful story on hockey literature that asked why there has been no great hockey book since Ken Dryden’s wonderful book “The Game,” which was published way back when we were playing goalie for Mankato West High School. Indeed, it is hard to believe that a game that condenses the poetry of motion of soccer and combines it with the violence of pugilism, and the choreography of basketball, does not have a body of literature worthy of the game.

For our own part, we pledge to work on this one of these years. We figure it’s a good start that we’ve had the skates out a few times this year to wet a blade with the young ones—nothing inspires a reconsideration like the next generation.

And finally, we note that in that same back issue, a Walrus writer paid us the indirect compliment of rewriting one of our stories—about the innovative approach of a certain Minneapolis lawyer who is revolutionizing (and humanizing) the process of divorce. Oh, and Utne magazine, our hometown blue-state bible of self-help, has recognized The Walrus as “Best New Title” in its annual alternative press awards. (We have been jumping and waving our arms from across Hennepin Avenue for three years now, and no one seems to notice over there. We love them, and they don’t seem to believe us. We are very needy, it is true.)

A little over a year ago, Paul Gruchow killed himself—and we are still feeling robbed. At the time, we put pen to paper and tried to memorialize him as best we could. We still believe that he was one of the finest environmental essayists ever, anywhere.

Just today, we finally got around to reading Michael Finley’s remembrance in an issue of Minnesota Monthly from a few months ago. Though he handles his subject delicately—and maybe just a hair too solicitously, but it is after all unkind to speak ill of the dead—Finley makes it clear that Gruchow was a troubled man. What was clearly a diagnosed case of bipolar disorder was activated and aggravated by Gruchow’s chosen profession. Gruchow was irritated that he hadn’t achieved wider acclaim. He knew what we know—he deserved it. Jealousy and envy are ugly emotions, but they are universal.

Finley stumbles a little in his tribute to Gruchow in trying to explain what Gruchow did on the printed page. It would have helped to quote Gruchow himself more, but this is a challenge in trying to reproduce a writer whose impact was subtle and cumulative—no major fireworks, just the slow accretion truth, rather like the way hay is baled.

The last time we spoke to Gruchow we talked about the unique kernal of truth that he shares with John Muir and with Aldo Leopold—but what is conspicuously missing in the writings of the better-known (and wealthy) Annie Dillard, and his real nemesis, the exceedingly popular Gretel Ehrlich.

Ehrlich titled her seminal book “The Solace of Open Spaces,” which was published in December of 1986. Two years later, Gruchow published his indispensible “The Necessity of Empty Places.” The slight play in titles is rhetorically a key to understanding the difference between the writers and where each belongs, relative to the canon of nature writing.

For Ehrlich and her long list of (predominantly female) acolytes, nature is really just a projection screen for an unrelenting program of self-help. To be fair, this tradition goes back to some fine American forebears—especially the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Nature is a proving ground for the human spirit—the value of flora and fauna in the environment is their capacity to communicate profound truths for the betterment of the observer—that is, the writer. We concern ourselves with nature because “open spaces” have the capacity to provide “solace” to human actors in their midst.

If that were as simple and true as many fleecey, tree-hugging, journaling hikers would like to believe, Gruchow would undoubtedly be alive today. Still, it’s not as if Gruchow didn’t cover some of the same territory, but he did it from exactly the opposite side of the mountain. Nature exists in, of, and for itself—it owes nothing to humanity. On the contrary, humanity owes it everything. It is enough to talk about conservation and perservation as goals in themselves—irrespecive of their “spiritual” or therapeutic value to the funny two-legged mammal with opposable thumbs.

This dichotomy is, interestingly enough, built into the charter of the United States park service. Congress charges our rangers with administering the national parks for both preservation AND access. Today, we constantly see the users fighting with the preservers. If more people read Gruchow today (and we are sure they eventually will) we’d talk less about parks as a “national resource” or “reserve” and more about how to protect environments that show minimal human input (or, more commonly, outtake). In other words wilderness has value independent of humans, and we’d be wise to start acting that way. Ironically, it would serve our long-range interests better. Gruchow knew that. It was not a truth that could save one man, but one for an entire community.

I assume the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated is out, although I have neither seen it nor gone looking for it, have never done so that I recall—though I certainly do not mind it when it passes into my life, say in the waiting room at Jiffy Lube. One of our prized possessions here in the office is an old copy of a swimsuit issue from, like, the paleolithic age, with Cheryl Tiegs on the cover. I say “our,” but Sandberg owns this, and he has it positioned to advantage in his cubicle. This is one of two tremendous assets of Sandberg’s cube, the other being a limitless supply of Ibuprofen.

People have asked what the connection is between Cheryl Tiegs and The Rake. I am not at liberty to give all the details, but the basic outline is this: We are good friends and fans of Dan Buettner’s (he wrote for our very first issue, but seems to have gotten very busy ever since—the power of a byline in our little rag!), and of course Dan and Cheryl have been dating for some time now. The lovely and gracious couple has been known to show up at various Rakish soirees. Sandberg has been threatening to have Cheryl autograph his yellowing artifact from the Mezzozoic (though we hasten to add that Miss Cheryl has aged far better than the magazine).

This old issue of Sports Illustrated is fascinating to look at for reasons other than taking a trip in the way-back machine to oogle swimsuit fashions in the era of Gerald Ford. It also has a feature on Henry Bouchet, the Minnesota North Star (and Warroad native) whose career was ended by an eye injury sustained in a terrible beating that occured in an NHL hockey game. (We remember that with horror. Horror! Twas ever thus; we left the end of last season with a similar, ferric taste in our mouths.) This year, of course, we don’t have pro hockey as a distraction—although we’re fast approaching the MSHSL tourney, and as everyone knows, kids peak early these days, especially jocks, so we like to share in their moment before the long decline into hairlessness and shoe sales and reunions in unbearably long five-year increments. Cue that old saw about the one TV we have here in the office, blah-de-blah.

So, anyway, I read somewhere that Sports Illustrated has, for very many years now, made a standing offer to its subscribers: Anyone who does not wish to receive the Swimsuit Issue may request that it not be delivered, and their account will be credited with an additional issue at the end of their subscription. I also read where there is no record of anyone ever exercising this option.

In other words, the wave of cancellation threats appears to come each year not from subscribers, but from the angry spouses of subscribers and other heated busybodies. This is not exactly rocket science, of course. What we see here is a failure to communicate. Dude, forget the free clock radio, the Sharper Image gift certificates, the coily tie-less shoelaces, the TIME-AOL-WARNER brand cordless telephone with three speed-dail presets. Sports Illustrated subscribers, you need to keep your eye on the ball here. It is your job to convince your partners that the swimsuit issue is a valuable resource in your ongoing efforts to educate yourselves in the finer sartorial points that are so central to the lives of your loved ones. We have it on good authority that there is nothing sexier than a man who takes a keen, empathetic interest in clothes and fashion and accessories and footware. And this is important: Be sure to indicate that it is only through being exposed to the extreme that you can better understand the mean. In other words, it is not possible to have a good understanding of sexy one-piece woolen bathing suits with three-quarter sleeves and revealing above-the-knee skirt without a summary of what’s going on in the area of thongs and string-bras.

Also, swimming is a very strenuous and serious sport, worthy of illustration.

It’s new-issue Monday, and there is nothing as exciting or scary as setting your work of the previous month before a jury of 65,000 peers. We tend to get feedback of three kinds. First, there are complimentary emails from readers who like what they read, and these are the ones we read repeatedly, we print them out and tape them onto the refrigerator, we high-five each other outside our cubicles, we go back and read the issue with a warm glow in our hearts, we buy flowers for our loved ones, we call our grandmothers just to say hello, we ride to lunch on a cloud of fizzy egotism. Aren’t we great?

The second sort of feedback we get is from smart readers who trouble-shoot the new issue for smallish, stupid errors (hopefully, never major ones—knock on wood!) on the order of screwed-up phone numbers, incomplete information, misspelled names, and that sort of thing. These are always terribly embarrassing, and we are suddenly plunged into a deep funk of despondency and self-loathing. Maybe we are working in the wrong industry? Who are we trying to fool? We really ought to be fired! We could always sell the house and go into sheep farming. We begin to hyperventilate. Then, just in time, a few more happy emails arrive, and we begin to feel better. We vow never to repeat the same inane mistakes. Stern warnings are issued, wrists are slapped. We will do better. We must do better. Someone will get fired next time, we swear, but ain’t gonna be a next time! Perfection is only a month away!

The final sort of feedback we get is just strange. There are occaisonally readers who think we lean one way politically, while they lean politically the other way, and it incenses them that our views seem to contradict their views. Now, to be perfectly fair, we DO have strong preferences about the way things are versus the way we think they ought to be. Despite banging on with our unsolicited opinions about “objectivity” and “news” and “media” and “blogging” and “neo-cons,” we wish to clarify that we are merely observers with (we hope) informed opinions about the industry in which we work. The magazine is not really a news vehicle per se, not in the same way that a daily or weekly newspaper is. That’s not our gig, that’s the other guys. So we’re more comfortable about have a special take on any subject we may take up. But see here: We think one of the mortal sins of working in media is succumbing to shrill, predictable, party politics. We wish to be correct, of course, but more important than being correct is being a pleasure to our readers. We think there are very few pleasures in shrill, predictable, party politics. We try to find new, interesting, fresh ways to say true things.

But our point is a more mundane, interesting one. For some reason, each time we receive a note from someone who is unhappy with their perception of our politics, that person without fail does not sign his or her name, nor leave any return address. It is almost as if they are ashamed of their own opinions. We feel fairly confident in calling this, too, a sin—though it’s probably a venal one. A person who lacks the courage of her convictions makes us sad, and slightly irritated, and we make the grumpy decision not to publish these sorts of letters, even when they are very smart or funny (which they often are). This is a short-term satisfaction; if you want to express your opinion to our other esteemed readers, you need to sign your name so we can at least make sure you’re who you say you are. But in the big picture, it’s depressing, because it represents a breakdown in one of the fundamental processes of a civil society: The thoughtful public colloquy about controversial and difficult issues. That’s pretty lame, and karmically speaking, just one step above anonmyously vandalizing the walls of public bathrooms.

We may have gotten a little carried away yesterday, a little intemperate. After all, we love Frank Rich. His far-ranging free association is often a delight to read (but like his neo-con complement, David Brooks, his conclusions are sometimes a little thin). Rich was merely the cart onto which we loaded our rotten apples—it’s nothing to do with Rich, it’s the widespread conflation of news with opinion. (Most of these public spin-squabbles could be avoided by saying, “Where in the newspaper did you read THAT?”) It’s news “anchors” like Brit Hume framing every news story with a dismissive, normative snear that always sets the table for a neo-con take-away. Some have argued that “objective journalism” is really an anachronism of the 20th century—that newspapering before and since has been (should be) relentlessly partisan. At least you know where your reporters stand. That may be.

For the first time in my life I’ve caught myself wanting to muzzle certain excitable “writers” —both online and in print—for their brazen lies, their cultism, their arrogance. I find myself entertaining the idea that the world needs neo-cons to be the opposition party, not the ruling party, and considering their inherent virtues and vices that make this so. I’m not really questioning the Holy Gospel of the First Amendment, but I chafe at the proposition that all voices should be weighed with equanimity. Some of the bloggers I admire most have recently taken up the slogan “there are no margins in compromise,” and it resonates with me, and I find that disturbing. Reasonable disagreement, civility, compromise—these are Enlightenment values. Values in which our country, and our First Amendment, are anchored.

A few other tangents I would add to yesterday’s spleen-venting action: People do not argue whether Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken, or Bill O’Reilly will obsolete journalism. Why does the medium of print (online) trick us into believing that smart bloggers have anything more to add to the basic fund of Truth than those Greco-Roman wrestlers of partisan politics? Those guys HAVE impacted journalism (some more than others) not by practicing it themselves, but by casting a broad pall of cynicism over all legitimate journalism. To my mind, when industry folks worry about the impact of blogs and bloggers, they are sort of tilting at windmills. Do they really expect opinions to replace facts?—well…

I know why Frank Rich is in the Arts & Leisure section. Newspapers today are trying to compete with the subjects they cover. In other words, they are in the attention economy along with all the news, art, and entertainment goings-on that themselves capture their reader’s attention. Aside from the A section, the backpages are being populated with material that is gray-area—lots of pictures, trend, lifestyle, and service stuffing that is traditionally the purview of magazines. (Aha, now you reach the reason why I am so exercised—It’s a turf war!) Naturally, you put your critics in the arts pages, not on the op-ed pages.

My point about NPR yesterday sort of pointed beyond itself. Whenever someone attempts a “bias in media” study, they for some reason land on public broadcasting as the inevitable gold standard. (McNeil news hour also deserves a nod as an attempt at opinion-free news reporting.) This is hardly an accident. Public Broadcasting is very leery about publishing opinion, for a variety of interesting reasons.

Maybe the way to guarantee the existence of an authoritative, non-partisan news source is to increase funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That way, partisan squabbles can cancel themselves out more or less at the pre-funding stage, rather than on after the news cycle at the pundits’ table. Why is the BBC still considered the acme of unimpeachable authority in world news? (Please don’t trot out any hay-penny scandals of recent years that merely prove the point by exception.)

One final point. There are some interesting eyewitness blogs that look pretty revolutionary—particularly from a war zone. But I think one needs to be careful to assess these for any hidden score-settling. War blogs from soldiers are notoriously cheerleaderish, and that’s fine as far as it goes—but it is insane to equate these with real war-zone reporting by even comparing the two. (The meta-media version of equal time: forty killed in Iraqi suicide bombing. Yeah, but what are the bloggers saying about it?) Lastly, the press pool at the White House may be lousy with excellent bloggers, but I would not class processing and replying to a White House spokesperson—or the President himself—as reporting per se, particularly in this day and age. Again, this often falls into the category of exegesis and rhetorical argument—fine as far as they go, but hardly a substitute for observed facts and sourced quotes.

I will now retire for a painful, four-hour episode of public scourging.

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.

For some reason our attempt to point you to Steve Gilliard’s compelling thoughts on “New Journalism” failed yesterday, so we’ll try again. I am envious of Gilliard’s broad-ranging feel for the middle-distance history of journalism—particularly as it was affected by the convulsions of the sixties and seventies. How could such intense social and political upheaval have NOT energized journalists and journalism? (How can it fail to do so today? And I am not talking about blogs.) In a free society, it is impossible for these sorts of phenomena to happen without the press taking notice, and once they do, the phenomena can kind of feed on themselves and develop in new trajectories. How much longer would Vietnam have lasted without television cameras in the field? How would the world be different today if Gerald Ford had never been president? (Uh… hmm…)

But but but. Several issues to follow-up on from yesterday’s addendum. Gilliard’s lowest diss is to call someone or something “irrelevant” and we think this could bear a little unpacking. It is Gilliard’s paradigmatic assumption that journalism can and should change the world, right the wrongs, redress the complaints of the timid and weak, fix flat tires, and generally point in the right direction out of the slough of the present. We have no problems with this view of journalism—it is what the nation’s daily and weekly newspapers should be doing, and generally are doing, when they aren’t publishing the lifestyle tripe they believe is necessary to attract all those solipsistic, suburban TV addicts.

We must confess that we took a moment to enjoy the sweet taste of schadenfreude in Gilliard’s funny and precise dismissal of Dave Eggers—”a silly, irrelevant man. ” We also couldn’t agree more that The Writing Program has done more violence to writing than a half-century of TV, radio, video games, and the web combined. Still, we think it is a little unfair to expect someone like Eggers to bear the cross of New, New Journalism. Yes, it would be nice to have a class of literature that embraced the world more directly and energetically, rather than turning inward, but why throw out with the bathwater anyone who has ever out pen to paper? Besides,Galliard is being selectively myopic when he carps about the state of literature today. I think, for example, that Franzen and Lethem are the spearhead of a new, new literature that synthesizes the introversion of young people today with a terra-stomping kind of allegorical quality. And what about the medium-old guard, folks like Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster, Nick Hornby, not to mention the old old guard like Philip Roth and John Updike? To see these writers as essentially hermetic is to read them in less than one dimension, while at the same time idolizing youth.

Anyway, the whole point is this: Why expect literature to do journalism’s job? Good writing, no matter what the genre or category—whether you’re talking about first-edition hardcovers or cereal boxes—has only one obligation, and that is to the Truth. There are inward and outward truths, and presumably these can inform each other.

The problem with workaday beat journalists is that they approach literature and the truth on a deadline, and they believe that great work is measured by the writer’s last byline. History moves in bigger circles than that. It is easy, today, to see that Hunter Thompson’s work transcends its time, transcends itself. It is not primarily about its outward marks—the stylistic departures, the lack of formalism, and it’s a fool’s errand looking for a contemporary equivalent. The reason there are no Thompsons today is not that there aren’t any; it’s that we won’t know about them for a decade or so.