Sad, no? This article is so full of hysterical, craptastic ironies. For example, the subtitle is:

The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters.

I actually had to read that a few times, to make sure I got that right. Fact-finding? Right. I mean it’s not like the media’s ever gotten something wrong. Those damn blogs…exposing…media…lies.

The late Christopher Lasch once wrote that public affairs generally and journalism in particular suffered not from too little information but from entirely too much. What was needed, he argued, was robust debate. Lasch, a historian by training but a cultural critic by inclination, was writing in 1990, when the Internet was not yet a part of everyday life and bloggers did not exist.

Bloggers now are everywhere among us, and no one asks if we don’t need more full-throated advocacy on the Internet. The blogosphere is the loudest corner of the Internet, noisy with disputation, manifesto-like postings and an unbecoming hatred of enemies real and imagined.

“imagined”? What “enemies” have we “imagined”? As the article goes on, it’s clear that Mr. Skube is simply throwing a temper-tantrum over the fact that bloggers (gasp) have the nerve to question the media. Oh, and this isn’t just an attack on Conservative bloggers. No, no. This is the media attacking bloggers in general.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whose popular blog Daily Kos has been a force among antiwar activists, cautioned bloggers last week “to avoid the right-wing acronym MSM.” It implied, after all, that bloggers were on the fringe. To the contrary, he wrote, “we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we’re selling.”

Moulitsas foresees bloggers becoming the watchdogs that watch the watchdog: “We need to keep the media honest, but as an institution, it’s important that they exist and do their job well.” The tone is telling: breezy, confident, self-congratulatory. Subtly, it implies bloggers have all the liberties of a traditional journalist but few of the obligations…

And yet none of this makes them journalists, even in the sense Lasch seemed to be advocating.

Of course not. We haven’t attended the Snobbed-Up School of Selective-Reporting and Agenda-Pushing. You have to be a special person to push an agenda, folks.

In our time, the Washington Post’s reporting, in late 2005, of the CIA’s secret overseas prisons and its painstaking reports this year on problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center — both of which won Pulitzer Prizes — were not exercises in armchair commentary. The disgrace at Walter Reed, true enough, was first mentioned in a blog, but the full scope of that story could not have been undertaken by a blogger or, for that matter, an Op-Ed columnist, whose interest is in expressing an opinion quickly and pungently. Such a story demanded time, thorough fact-checking and verification and, most of all, perseverance. It’s not something one does as a hobby.

Uh huh. This sounding like a fifth-grade argument to anyone else? “Yeah, well, sure bloggers were the ones that actually exposed it. But, but, ya know, we…we…told other people”. Right in that paragraph, as he’s attacking bloggers as “armchair” commentators, he acknowledges the fact that they exposed a major story the media knew nothing about.

How ironic that he bases a majority of his point on the fact that fact-checking needs to be done? And the lying, agenda-driven, proven-inaccurate media sources are just the ones to do it!

I never thought I’d type this, but Skube, leave Markos the hell alone. See, he hasn’t just pissed off one side of the blogosphere. You’re messing with both, my friend.

He’s under the assumption that we actually want to be like them. As if we’ll grow up to be “real journalists” some day. Newsflash to Skube: We distance ourselves from the MSM. We fact-check their reporting, hold their feet to the fire, and release the important information they won’t. A 24/7 news service with several hundred (or more) employees? Not our thing.

Ace writes:

What we do is point out mistakes the media makes. Mistakes and deliberate omissions and flat-out dishonestly. And we question the judgment by which the MSM purports to assign stories news-value and by that assignment of priority instruct us upon what the relative value of a story might be. And we also question the assumptions undergirding their worldview — and their bias.

That’s what the media doesn’t like, of course. They don’t want to simply report facts. That is not nearly a grandiose enough job for them. They want to inform the public, not just factually but philosophically. They demand not merely that their “facts” be accepted without question (though a great many of those are in fact highly questionable), but their judgment and worldview be uncritically accepted as well. They want us not just to take their word as regards their somewhat dubious area of expertise — reportage of facts — but they want us to also accept their take, their spin, their belief in how the world works– and how it should work.

Correct. We’re not looking to fact-check stories instead of the media. We fact-check the media when it sounds like hogwash. And all too often, it turns out to be just that. I’ll leave you with some more from Ace:

No one — no one — ever got into the media to report on local car collisions or new and exciting federal farm subsidies.

What they got into the media to do was to tell people how and what to think, and its that prerogative of the Intellectual Aristocracy, and not the unglamorous business of information collection, collation, and dissemination, that they’re crying about losing.

Note that they do not dare actually state their belief that they are specially qualified to do the thinking for the American public. They can’t say such a thing. The public would laugh at their presumption — some idiots went to a one year finishing school (and not a particularly academically demanding one besides) and now they have the special privilege of deciding what the public should think about each and every issue?…

Reporters seem to think they sell the news at 75 cents a copy — and they tell us all how to interpret and analyze that news at no additional charge.

They think they’re being generous by offering us their scary talents in this regard for free.

The rest of don’t give a whit how steeply-discounted their dubious expertise is offered — we didn’t subcontract our thinking to them and it will be an unseasonably cold day in hell when America complies with their demands to concede that they alone are capable of doing the intellectual work of democratic governance.

And seriously? Not to harp on this, but really, guys. It’s a frigging three semester degree of recent invention and dubious academic rigor. Get over yourselves already, for the love of all that’s holy. You’re embarrassing yourselves.

You know what you call a guy who couldn’t get into med school?

Dentist.

You know what you call a guy who couldn’t get into dental school?

Journalist.