Oh, good lord, whatever. You know what's wrong with the media today? J-school. Journalism as a major clearly destroys whatever natural writing ability a person may have. Of course, maybe that's the objective when you're writing for Time or The New York Times, to speak the news in as bland and mundane a fashion as possible, with the occasional decadent excursion into Thesaurus-land. Let's begin, shall we? From Time magazine, we have this utterly condescending little piece, entitled "The Net Roots Hit Their Limits": It opens with this paragraph: You've heard the story: the Netroots, the Democratic Party's equivalent of a punk garage band'edgy, loud and antiauthoritarian'are suddenly on the verge of the big time. The gang of liberal bloggers and online activists who helped raise millions of dollars for Howard Dean's presidential campaign two years ago are now said to be Democratic kingmakers. Last month in Connecticut, they fanned anti-incumbent and antiwar flames and were widely credited with the primary defeat of Senator Joe Lieberman, leading him to run as an independent. After they relentlessly derided Senator Hillary Clinton as calculating, overly cautious and lacking true liberal bona fides, she hired an adviser just to deal with them and even demanded that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resign. Coincidence? Moderate Democrats say it with remorse, conservatives with glee, but the conventional wisdom is bipartisan: progressive bloggers are pushing the Democratic Party so far to the left that it will have no chance of capturing the presidency in 2008. And ends with this one: Even with these changes, the Netroots won't be kingmakers. The fact is, day-to-day campaigning in 2006 is not very different from how it was in 1996: candidates call a few very rich people to ask them to give money so the campaign can run ads on television and hope soccer moms catch them between cooking dinner and driving to practice. If the Democrats win in the fall elections, the roots of that victory will not be on the Net. And somehow in the process manages to miss every salient point along the way. The author, Perry Bacon, Jr., saws on and on for three pages about how blogs have reached the limits of their efficacy in the political discourse and are now having to resort to real-world, old-fashioned campaign tactics like letters to the editor and door to door canvassing. I guess that the notion that this expansion (going from being words on a screen to being actual boots on the ground) is the next logical step in our growth would be too much for Mr. Bacon to concede. His first paragraph comes close to the truth. The Progressive Blogosphere is Nirvana (the band, not the state of mind), and soft-left establishment rags like Time are, well, Winger. Even little Brandon Nyhan in his weaselly cri de coeur last week admits that the great frigates of "opinion journalism" (whatever that means) have suffered heavy damage to their previously impregnable hulls and are now rapidly taking on water. It's because of the war, stupid. If the last five years have shown us anything, it is the fact that we can't trust you. You all stood by with your hands in your pockets while a reckless and power-crazed administration sold you a pack of lies and took our nation to war against another sovereign nation, unprovoked. Iraq was no threat to the United States. But it is NOW! So everything you people say now is suspect. You can't be relied upon to tell the truth, to be curious, or to fulfill your traditional role as watchdog against unchecked corruption in the halls of power. And that's why the blogosphere's numbers keep getting bigger even as newspapers and news magazines see their circulation shrinking and dwindling before their very eyes. Once the world heard Kurt Cobain's guitar, all that spandex and hairspray and makeup on the likes of Ratt, Warrant, and Poison was revealed for the preening frippery that it was. In three chords, Nirvana set fire to the whole of the 80's and left it for dead, and no amount of retrospectives, Behind the Music specials or appearances on Headbanger's Ball could bring it back to life again. To be fair, the article does quote Jane and gives this blog a little pat on the head: Jane Hamsher, who runs the piquant online hangout Firedoglake, and other bloggers have started the "roots project," in which they employ nonweb political tactics like writing letters to the editors of their local newspapers. "We can hammer the New York Times and the Washington Post forever," Hamsher said, but "candidates are more influenced by what we're doing in their own backyards." "Piquant"? How's that for a condescending little adjective? "Piquant" is mustard. It's Amy Grant singing songs about her mother. How about "pithy", "pointed", or "provocative"? But this is precisely what I meant earlier about Journalizzzzzm school and the inverted pyramid writing style destroying whatever talent a writer might have for finding and deploying le mot juste. Take for instance this bit from Jennifer Senior's breezily clueless (and kind of smug about it) review of Lewis Lapham's Pretensions to Empire and Sidney Blumenthal's How Bush Rules. The left has often complained that what it needs isn’t polite speech, but voices as pungent as those on the right. Maybe so. But even the angriest people on the right tend to be funny. Books like this one are a depressing reminder of how important it is for writers to have a slight sense of humor about themselves, if they want to be taken at all seriously. "Pungent"? Is that the best word you could come up with, Jennifer, honey? I think you meant "plangent". "Pungent" means a penetrating stink. And while I might use that word to describe books by Ann Coulter or Bill O'Reilly, I don't think that's the word you want. ("You keep saying that word, but I don't think eet means what you theenk it does'") "Plangent" means a loud and penetrating sound, and I can't believe your editor didn't make you change it. That's just bad writing, to say nothing about that review's utterly empty cargo hold of ideas. But take heart, my fellow firedogs. It's the mainstream media's job to "misunderestimate" us. Five years from now, Condoleezza Rice and Don Rumsfeld and Joe Lieberman will be disgraced, unemployed, and making the talk show rounds saying, "No one could have predicted how powerful the netroots would become." Yup. That's because they believed what they read the mainstream press. by Matt O.