Hugh Hewitt had on Joseph Rago today,  author of  "The Blog Mob – Written by fools to be read by imbeciles", for a good 50 minute interview and in good old fashioned Hugh Hewitt fashion he made Joe look like…

… and accurate to a fault?….. *snort*

- Bang

The only credit I will give them is they certainly do know how to encourage our enemies. Imagine the pride the sniper felt when his work was featured on CNN last month.

Here is my suggestion with the MSM. All ties to Al-Jazeera be broken. No longer rebroadcast any stories by them. This should be considered as fratenizing with the enemy and punishable as treason. If they want the story, go out with our guys and dodge the bullets, then come back and give us the story. – Lorica

As far as the MSM being correct, yippie they got the last several months right. Who cares!! They are getting what they wished for. They wanted this present “Quagmire” and now we are in it. This is as much a fault of their aid and comfort to the enemy as it is the ability for the enemy to operate against our troops. Don’t be deceived by this sudden media got it right garbage. This is what they have been hoping for and they will stand convicted for their treason. The MSM’s only desire is to see GW fail completely. They believe they brought down Nixon, and they want to prove their glory days aren’t over. Well their dreams and desires are being built on the blood of the American soldier, and there is no forgiveness for this. – Lorica

There’s a touch of what we’ve come to know as the ‘chickenhawk’ mentality in this piece too. You know the type – if you haven’t hunched over a keyboard trying to meet a deadline at the NYT, you’re not fit to comment on us real journalists, so butt out. And we all know how logical pitfalls in that line of thinking.

Besides, Mr. Rago’s missing the point of blogs. They aren’t here to replace the MSM. In one sense, they’re expanded commentary pages. And that’s a perfectly legitimate function. Where is it written that the only opinions we get to read are on the NYT or WSJ editorial pages? By what right are their anointed columnists any better? Why is former Enron advisor Paul Krugman more qualfied to comment on Iraq than Sister Toldjah or Captain Ed? What does he bring to the table other than a bad base of BDS?

I think about it this way: Ben Franklin would likely be a blogger today. And I can see Joe Rago telling him to knock it off with those silly proverbs and opinion pieces and leave that to the people who went to a London journalism school.

But the dividing line between the MSM that reports news and the blogosphere that comments on it blurs when the MSM fails to report, or reports with malfeasance. I hate to break this to Mr. Rago – but when Charles Johnson over at LGF proved that Dan Rather’s TANG memos were forgeries, Charles was committing ::gasp:: journalism – looking into a story and finding out the facts. Rather, who should have been doing that, was NOT. So here’s a second function of the blogosphere: media watchdog. It wasn’t the media that exposed the fauxtography earlier this year – it was the blogosphere. It’s not the media that’s pressing AP to produce its mystery sources – it’s the blogs. None of those are what Mr. Rago calls “picking at the scraps.” It’s attacking major aspects of stories that the MSM chooses to overlook.

And if Mr. Rago doesn’t like blogs wading into the reporting area, the solution isn’t for the blogs to shut up; it’s for the MSM to clean up.

Mr. Rago’s also critical of blogs for being irresponsible – “they promote intellectual disingenuousness” is how he puts it. I submit that the MSM is worse. Look at the thougtful commentaries right here on this blog when stem cell research or global warming is the thread topic. You get some very sound, well-informed discussions. I challenge you to show me any reporting on say, NBC, that approaches complex topics that comprehensively. More likely, you’ll get a 20 second sound bite with a reporter fawning over Al Gore or Michael J. Fox. THAT is what’s intellectually disingenuous.

Oh yes, and when a blog makes a mistake, you know about it. The correction will be right up front, either in an update to the original post or in a new post at the top of the thread list. There’s no page C35 on a blog to hide the corrections, like there is in the NYT. Another point to be made for the MSM as more intellectually disingenuous.

Mr. Rago’s also missing another invaluable aspect of blogs: they’re wonderfully egalitarian. Mr. Rago may think there’s nothing to be gained by hearing from people who don’t live in the MSM homelands – New York, D.C, or L.A. I disagree – I like to hear from the rest of America, that part that the MSM looks on with suspicion and disdain. I like hearing what ST has to say in North Carolina. I like the fact that Brian out in Iowa can be heard. I like to read the Say Anything blog and get Rob’s opinions from North Dakota. North freaking Dakota? When the hell is the last time that, for example, the LA Times even acknowledged that there IS such a place??

So my message to Sis is this: please continue being the moron, and I’ll be happy to continue being one of the imbeciles that reads your thoughts, and every now and then picks up a digital crayon and scribbles some of my own here. Thanks for what you do.

Neither Lowry nor Captain Ed were arguing that we should start propping up the MSM, nor did they argue that we shouldn’t be skeptical. Both acknowledged that the MSM has brought reader skepticism about what they report on themselves. They are simply saying that the media is not always wrong, and in Ed’s case, he’s arguing that going between blogs and the MSM are good ways to find out what the whole story really is on what’s going on there.

I stand behind no one in my criticism and contempt for media reporting on Iraq, and other issues and nothing has changed regarding my opinion on that, but the fact is, as I noted in my other comment to MD, conditions have been deteriorating in Iraq and the media has been reporting it for months, and now the Pentagon and even the President are acknowledging that things have not been going well there and Lowry and Ed are saying that complaints about media bias don’t negate that the media has been correct in reporting the steady decline in what little bit of stability we have/had in Iraq. And if we can’t acknowledge that reality – that things aren’t going well there and that we need to regroup and restrategize – then we have lost touch with reality. Even if we could eradicate all traces of media bias from reporting on Iraq, that doesn’t change the reality on the ground there and that is that even though there IS good news in Iraq, there is more bad than good and that has to change.

I also want to disagree with Mr. Lowery about the fact that good news doesn’t make for good news. How many of us were subject to stories about Columbine 10 year later stories?? About how they have moved on, have been healed, what they are doing with their lives now stories. Awesome news in some cases. But in the over 2600 building projects the Corps of Engineers has completed so far in Iraq, you can’t find 1 good news article in the MSM.

I think any criticism of the MSM and it’s bias is well deserved. I don’t automatically throw out the news because of the source, but it is automatically suspect, and that holds for Fox News too. Are bad things happening in Iraq?? YES!! It is a war zone for God’s sake. But are good things going on there too. Yes, it is a war zone in which the American War Fighter is present. And there is no more stauncher ally, more intelligent figher, more compassionate warrior, more fiercer soldier on the face of the planet Earth. – Lorica

Iraq Mission for the COE:
http://www.grd.usace.army.mil/

Factsheet Iraq for COE:
http://www.grd.usace.army.mil/news/factsheets/docs/November_2006.pdf

Everybody fell for Josephe Rago’s bait in his WSJ OpEd piece, The Blog Mob. In response to “Written by fools to be read by imbeciles,” I say that blogs are by us fools for us imbeciles. We bloggers want to…

For decades (not just once in a while) the MSM was among the most docile and obedient bootlickers of the Soviet Union. Every twisted lie the Kremlin dreamed up was repeated by the MSM of the 60s, 70s and 80s. In the paranoid bubble the MSM inhabits, the USA was the Evil Empire and Ronald Reagan was the reincarnation of Hitler.

Now many of the same MSM quislings that flaked for the Soviet Empire are repeating their act in favor of the Islamofascist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere. The growing “Jamil Hussein” scandal that has snared AP, the “fautography” scandal that haunted Reuters, the Eason Jordan affair, the “no WMDs in Iraq” lie, the fake “Koran flushing” story, the Gitmo=Gulag hype, the “domestic spying” lie, the Valerie Plame-out, are just a small sample of recent MSM dirty-work.

So I am puzzled by Captain Ed’s and Lowry’s attitude. It is true that not everything the MSM says is inaccurate, but with a decades-long pattern of deceit I doubt that this represents a sudden return to moral sanity by the lords of the MSM. Nor is it clear that conservatives have “lost touch with reality” – if anything, conservatives have too often maintained a glum silence and let the MSM slide over inaccurate reporting in Iraq. Overstating their case has not exactly been a problem with the supporters of President Bush.

Lowry writes, Mainstream media outlets have their biases; they also have plenty of good reporting on which one can rely. It’s up to us as discriminating consumers to find the difference. But what reason do we have to believe this? History clearly shows us the MSM lies constantly in service to leftist political ieology. And even if it is true that some information is accurate, do not ST and Captain Ed and others do a far better job of reporting the facts than the MSM does? And at any rate, does not the high degree of inaccurate reporting from the MSM indicate that perhaps we would be better off without them? What exactly do conservatives gain by propping up the MSM?

The MSM have not put away childish things.

Just read the childish things written about the President. The MSM still think as a child and think others still think as a child. But most others, especially most blogs, have become grown up, and put away childish things.