Friday, October 21, 2005

I can't follow Kinsley's logic here:

"To give journalists such special privileges you have to define who is and who is not a journalist. That is harder to do in the age of the Internet. One reason for the explosion of hostility toward Miller and the Times is the resentment of the blogosphere. Blogging is, if anything, more like the kind of pamphleteering the Framers had in mind when they guaranteed 'freedom of the press' than are the New York Times or The Washington Post. But if everyone with a blog or an e-mail discussion board is a journalist, who isn't?"

People hate Miller and the NYT because they hate the blogosphere?

Frankly, very few people give a shit about the blogosphere. And it's Miller's defenders (for example, Keller, Abrams and Miller herself) who are criticizing the blogosphere for purportedly publishing lies and rumors about Miller. Further, a number of bloggers/pro-blog commentators are using the example of Miller's lies to assert a (mostly bogus) claim of the superiority of blogging, as well as the (somewhat less bogus) claim that bloggers called attention to Miller's lies.

I suppose Kinsley could mean resentment of Miller from the blogosphere or by the blogosphere is responsible for the anti-Miller explosion, but that claim wouldn't make sense in the context of the paragraph. If that's what Kinsley intended to say, he needs a better editor.

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