Do Democrats Hate the Blogs?

At CNN one Sunday Morning,
High upon the gallows tree,
Eason Jordan gave his young life
For the cause of Journalese.

Another martyr for MSM,
Another martyr to the Blogs ...
The brutal Blogs may crush the Networks
But cannot keep our spirits down!

We can establish one thing right off - it's certainly cool for liberals to hate blogs. Elsewise, Democratic Strategist (ha ha ha) Bob Beckel could not have unleashed his recent tirade on FOX against "a bunch of bloggers" (print cannot convey the contempt in his tone) who "shoot first and ask questions later." If he'd said that about vegetarians ... it would have made no sense, but there would have been trouble anyway.

But that's nothing. Bertram Pecquerie at editorsweblog.org loads up the biggest blunderbuss he's got and lets it fly:

... there is one advantage in this story: masks are fallen! Within the honest community of bloggers, some of them claimed to be the "sons of the First Amendment", they were just the sons of Senator McCarthy ... Real promoters of citizen media would have to take some distance with those who have fueled and organised the Eason Jordan hatred. If not, the "new era of journalism" opened by the blogosphere will appear as the old clothes of American populism.

By "American populism", Pecquerie does not mean Howard Dean. He means, like, the Ku Klux Klan.

Like Beckel, Pecquerie just ignores the fact that liberals Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd were present when the remarks were made, and objected to them. Beckel is a potted blowhard for FOX News, but Pecquerie has the room to opine at length and might have taken the time to note this. I guess he decided that accusing bloggers of McCarthyism was easier and more emotive.

Of course, Pecquerie refers to "real promoters of citizen media" (whoever those people are), so he doesn't hate all the blogs, right? And there are lots of Democratic and liberal blogs, so how could Democrats hate the blogs?

In fact, cyber-donk bloggers are some of the biggest blogosphere-haters around. They especially hate the fact that non-liberals are allowed to blog, too, which is one of those totally unfair things - like Talk Radio, and presidential elections. As long as this state of affairs is allowed, the country is one nanometer away from Totalitarianism and McCarthyism and Orwellianism and maybe even a ban on partial-birth abortion. A commenter at NYU's PressThink helpfully explains:

Eason Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a streetgang.

I think it is fair to generalize (exceptions exist, of course) the left-blogger view as follows: Blogging is socially acceptable behavior, which liberals and activists can use to their advantage, so not all blogs are bad. But the public influence of the blogosphere is bad. Above all, the severe damage that the blogs have dealt out to the Establishment Media is bad. All in all, the tendency of blogs to take themselves seriously as a new cultural force is bad, and dangerous.

There is much complaining about "blogger triumphalism" from the left, but you may call it all hypocrisy. If cyber-donk blogs had succeeded in doing to FOX News what PowerLine (et al) did to CBS, they'd be crowing over it for the next 20 years. They don't have a problem with triumphalism, they have a problem with losing.

But how in the world did liberals come to identify themselves with the losers in these fights? Don't they vigorously deny the existence of MSM liberal bias - asserting to the contrary that the media is conservative? That being the case, why the Hell do they care what happens to CNN and CBS? Aren't they just big, bloated media corporations that deserve to be eaten alive by earnest citizens like ourselves? Somebody want to get their freaking story straight here?

If liberals think that the MSM is their friend (which means that they're lying their butts off when they claim it is not), my advice would be to get some new friends. Your "friends" are, at this moment, trying to explain to their readers and viewers why the CNN News Czar lost his job because of something that the MSM never bothered to report to their readers and viewers.