By Wlady Pleszczynski on 2.13.02 @ 6:26PM
Is it better to watch Aaron Brown, or read a blogger?
NO RE GRETA: Whether a recognizable Greta Van
Susteren would have scored this big we'll never know. But her
numbers tell the story. According to a morning
report, she outdrew her CNN rival Aaron Brown by more than
three hundred thousands viewers a day in their first head to head
confrontation last week.
Must have been unhappy news to leading "me-ziner" Josh Marshall,
who last September 15 heralded Brown's
hiring by CNN as a "dynamite pick." Not having ever really watched
him before Sept. 11, Marshall was drawn to the "ingenuousness" of
Brown's "TV manner" and the way he "elicits or explicates new
information that more stuffy or programmed questioners and anchors
would never arrive at." In short, said Marshall, a strong liberal
voice, "He's got this way of thinking aloud on air which, for me at
least, really works."
It's easy to see why. According to samples culled from the
files of
the Media Research Center's anti-bias brigade, Brown is the sort of
newsman who rued the U.S.'s decision to connect Yasir Arafat to the
illegal shipment of arms of from Iran to the PLO as a step that
"will not exactly help get the peace process back on track"; who
raked White House counsel Albert Gonzales over the coals on the
subject of military tribunals but lobbed softballs at Sen. Patrick
Leahy; who reported that the argument that politics played no role
in the Supreme Court's resolution of the Florida recount "may be a
hard sell to many Americans" and that "many people" worry that the
court's "precious commodity has been diminished."
Perhaps I've spoken out of turn. Not about Brown, but about his
erstwhile champion, Josh Marshall. As best I can tell, he hasn't
returned to the subject of Brown; maybe he liked him only in the
immediate post-nine-eleven context. But there's a larger point: how
long is anything said by a so-called "blogger" -- an already tired
term used to describe the growing number of individuals talking and
posting away on their own personal websites -- to remain valid?
"The Weekly Standard" this week posted a definitive
parody of run-amok blogging and the wacky back and forths and
cross-linking and self-referentiality and full immersion in the
increasingly ephemeral that the genre inspires. In this climate, it
seems, nothing lasting can be said, nor even anything remotely
serious.
But that's of course unfair to all sorts of bloggers, whose
energy and enterprise provide readers with access to untold amounts
of information. Just yesterday, for instance, James Taranto's Best
of the Web Today provided
easy links to the statement 60 scholars signed in support of the
war on terrorism. Among the signatories, it turns out, one could
find Glenn Loury, an erstwhile neoconservative whom the "New York
Times Magazine" recently trumpeted as a black American who had seen
the error of his ways and even had a reconciliation of sorts with
Jesse Jackson. So what was Loury's name doing on the letter? The
Web will probably provide an explanation a lot sooner than the
Times will.
What's more, it turns out, many bloggers don't suffer from
logorrhea at all. The hard-to-top Andrew Sullivan is merely
capacious. By comparison, Marshall or Mickey Kaus are minimalists, clear
exponents of less is more. They read and think first, then write a
few choice paragraphs or even sentences. Maybe they're protecting
themselves against burn-out. How long can Sullivan, say, go on at
it his current pace?
The real problem with the Web isn't excess, but our inability to
process and convey as much information as we'd like. So we adjust,
mindful as before that "the now" is not the only thing in life.
Or at least we say we'll adjust. But then we remember there's
another Best of the Web Today going up tomorrow.
topics:
Supreme Court, Military, Iran, NATO, Energy
