What's got into you Susie Creamcheese?

Frank Zappa brought some indelible phrases in the 1960s including the one for the title of this post. In yesterday's opinion section of the WSJ, Joseph Rago who is an Assistant Features Editor, did a rant against the blogosphere. In the article, he compared some blogs to what Joseph Conrad said about newspapers "written by fools to be read by imbeciles." He concluded that "in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress." He dismissed political blogs as "predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line." His general assessment of the blogosphere went something like this "Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . ."

What struck me as funny was the contrast between his strident opinions and a short search of Rago's important, professional contributions to journalistic excellence. As an intern for the WSJ he wrote a compelling commentary on miniature golf. (August, 2005) That is not to say he has not done some serious stuff for the Journal - in August he did an article on Norman Podhoretz which was an interesting interview. But with that background, and early in his career, he might be a bit more careful with his rants. That is especially true when you understand that his previous journalistic career was with the Dartmouth Review. In June of 2004 he wrote a sophomoric piece on creating a branding identity (called the RagoForce) which had such he commented "How can someone not know Joe Rago?....Every day“What can be done?” Remember, it is your duty as Dartmouth students to promote the Joe Rago Brand." Isn't that a tone of "careless informality?"

The oddest thing about Mr. Rago's rant is his complete lack of understanding of the role that informal media has had on institutions that he was involved with. The Dartmouth Review, for the last couple of decades, has driven the admistration of the College nuts. Its prose is often of the quality of Mr. Rago's quoted article above but it has also performed a service by highlighting the narrow nature of some of the decisions of the administration.

The blogosphere is in its infancy. Indeed, there are a lot of blogs that are as bad as Mr. Rago paints them. But his broad brush is simply wrong. It is not necessary to list the thousands of blogs that distinguish themselves in either niche coverage that the main stream media does not cover or in presenting a point of view that is not done well in other venues. But Rago should reflect a bit on his idiotic generalizations. Part of the reason that the blogosphere has been as important a force as it has, has been the understanding that the traditional media often either misses major stories or gets them wrong. Mr. Rago might want to do his next article for the Journal on Dan Rather and his thoughts about the demands of professional journalistic ethics.