When did you stop blogging your wife?

We should be worried about our extremities today, rather than our extremists. Last night, we repaired down the block to meet up with one of our favorite blogging professionals for a beer, and nearly lost a few toes in the process. We also lost the desire to proceed any further with the editorial “we” until the weather improves. At fifteen below, it’s each man for himself.

I tend to cross the street when I see a discussion of “bloggers versus journalists” coming down the way. Or at least I nestle a little deeper into my parka and avoid eye contact. But I guess I do have a few loose opinions on the matter.

In nervous moments, I worry about the confusion of opinion and reporting in the newspages and on the airwaves. There is virtually no distinction anymore between news and news analysis, and this can be troubling. As Tom Tomorrow so eloquently parses this week, the right has been especially effective at a certain kind of slight-of-hand that swaps facts for opinion. You simply offer a disputed opinion as an accepted fact. This is the legendary “When did you stop beating your wife?” approach to colloquy. Why, we do it ourselves. It’s fun!

Earlier this week, Adam Penenberg wrote that news organizations are cracking down on their employees who blog, taking a dim view of the possible conflicts of interest and the corruption of opinion in news reporting. This is a noble concern, of course—typically, you are not granted official “blogger” status if you must run your posts by an editor or a publisher or a boss of any kind. We have been known to edit our posts here, or run them by lawyers to make sure we’re on the up-and-up, but we consider the daily operation to be part of the larger mechanics of our business. (We don’t officially call this–what you’re reading–a blog for this reason, and one other. To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, the blogging drawer frequently gets mistaken for the urinal in the offices of Big Media.) Perhaps larger news organizations should consider this approach. But what is most subtle is the basic paradigm at work, separate from the issues of objectivity and conflict of interest and that is that newspapers don’t want their websites to get scooped by their own writers and reporters. In other words, there is still a fundamental prejudice for paper, a “So when did you stop blogging your wife?”paradigm. This is understandable, since there are still no margins whatsoever in online publishing. But this is a sort of self-fulfilling pessimism. If news organizations paid their reporters to post scoops—as well as clearly identified, informed opinion—in the name of their employer’s brand, well, maybe advertisers would become more inclined to take the web seriously. It’s an issue of critical mass, of course. But if editors and publishers got over some of their prejudices, the whole business of journalism would advance a few baby steps.

As I say, this may mean learning to get more comfortable with the Fox approach to journalism which freely deals in news-as-entertainment, and opinion-as-news-as-entertainment. There is a way to accept and embrace this feeling of rudderlessness on a windy sea: Accept more of it, rather than demand less.

Being the broken-record that I am, it eternally recurs to me to reread E.B. White, and it is astonishing how timeless and timely some of his political essays are. Long before Watergate and Vietnam, he worried about the state of democracy, and his basic point was a genteel one: he said democracy is in peril when the unbeliever feels unwelcome here. In other words, it is essential that dissent be not only tolerated but safeguarded. These are not concrete, enactable values (and certainly not the exclusive property of the left) so much as a basic human generosity of spirit to live and let live. “I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant,” he wrote. “All writing slants the way a writer leans,and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.”

In that respect, I sometimes feel like I have lost an essential virtue—faith in my fellows, that they were born upright. Despite what I view as the conspiracy of lies and the lockstep of blind obedience that prop up the current monopoly, there is consolation in knowing that this is generating more heated blogging, more rabid conversation about first principles, not less. That the extreme right has somehow cultivated a sense of humor in its ascendency is annoying—but reassuring. They can recommend eliminating freedom of the press all they like, but until they do it, it’s just grist for the creative anarchy of the web.

Now, when they start actually messing with the Constitution is when we should take to the streets, no matter how cold it might be.