LA Times: Blogs No Substitute for "Patient Fact-Finding"

Someone named Michael Skube weighs in on blogs in relation to the MSM today, and clearly hasn't ever read Little Green Footballs, Patterico or myriad other bloggers who've made a name for themselves dissecting and exposing the duplicitous reporting and egregious errors made on a daily basis at the "newspapers of record."

Just the headline alone lets you know where this joker is headed.

Blogs: All the noise that fits: The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters.

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.

And to think most bloggers are doing all this on the side. "No man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, "ever wrote but for money." Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post -- are insistent partisans in political debate. Some reject the label "journalist," associating it with what they contemptuously call MSM (mainstream media); just as many, if not more, consider themselves a new kind of "citizen journalist" dedicated to broader democratization.

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."

So let's see: Kos, HuffPost, Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias. Sure looks like Skube is getting a balanced look at the blogosphere.

Clearly, Skube hasn't spent any time at the blogs such as Patterico that rip the LA Times to pieces for their shoddy reporting. I guess they're beneath him.

We'll leave you with this dreck.

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Someone call rewrite...