This is Not a Post

As some of you know I read This Modern World (both the political comic strip and the the blog) pretty regularly. And I've noted before Mr. Tomorrow's awkward position on blogging. Well, today he responded to this article in the Philly on the power of Blogs, which references the role bloggers played in keeping the Trent Lott scandal (in which he praised Strom Thurmond and wished that he had won in his presidential bid) alive in a post named "Pissing in the Wind."

Tomorrow passes on the claims of the Philly, and then notes that this account;

leaves out one significant detail: this site's small but crucial role in the whole matter. As some of you may recall, the balance was apparently tipped when footage surfaced of Trent Lott making the same comments about Strom Thurmond a third time. And the reason that footage became public was that a reader of this site had caught it on C-Span several years prior, grasped the significance, and saved the tape. He emailed me and I put the information up on my site, where it was ignored by pretty much everyone. I then called up a producer I knew at MSNBC, which ran with the scoop, albeit without acknowledging the source. Soon it was all over the networks and Fox pundits were speculating that the DNC must have had an army of interns poring over old footage.

Short story: the Lott thing is not quite the Triumph of the Blogs tale that myth has made it. The story gained momentum because of the blogs. And if I hadn't been blogging, the reader who had the tape might never have contacted me. But what finally brought down Trent Lott was primarily a guy, I believe in the Midwest, with an old videotape and a long memory, and secondarily, the fact that I had a friend working at MSNBC. (Since I called him on the phone, you could just as easily credit the telecommunications network as the blogs...)

...just so we're clear, I'm not that worried about getting "credit" here--I was really little more than a conduit. I'm just tired of seeing this triumphalist myth repeated over and over, when I know for a fact that the blogs were only part of the story...

This is a bit strained, to say the least. Tomorrow was running a blog during this period, and that because of his blog he received information from somebody in the Midwest, which he posted the essentials of on his blog, and then passed on to a TV news station. And this somehow proves that blogs aren't really all they are cracked up to be. Seems like this story could easily be used to demonstrate the value that Blogs can provide to our media culture, but Mr. Tomorrow isn't interested in proving that Blogs have value. He's interested in denying that blogs have value. Or, at the very lest, in denying that blogs have excessive value.

It's kind of unclear what role Mr. Tomorrow thinks Blogs should play, exactly.

As I've said before I think the root of Mr. Tomorrow's (and others) problem's with the practice of blogging is this simple preposition. If everybody gives their opinion and each opinion is valued equally, than opinions becomes worthless. Mr. Tomorrow might see the value in an Atrios or a Joshua Michah Marshall having a blog. These people have proven their bona fides. But do most blogs have this caliber of individual behind them? Should you really compare what those two sites offer with the majority of Blogs?

More to the point can you really compare even what those blogs offer with say, the New Yorker Magazine. Or the New York Times?

My personal response to this might be that good writing and valuable and meaningful ideas will rise. While certainly magazines and newspapers have little to fear from the Blogs, if the Blogs provide valuable information or insights than why shouldn't they contribute to the national discourse?