Why blog?
This is why.
"Unsigned institutional editorials on Deep Global Matters are an anachronism, a vestige of the top-down, shut-up-and-listen era when newspapers monopolized the municipal ear. Those days are done. The entire idea of an editorial board, with its overtones of egghead think-tanks staffed with MacNamara clones, may have worked for the Univac era. But those were the days of The Authorities. You know: whenever there was a problem in a sci-fi movie, someone Alerted the Authorities. That meant the big omniscient grey seamless apparatus with a million meshing parts. The Army, the Government, the FBI, the TV stations, the newspapers, the guy who got on the loudspeaker and told everyone to stay in their homes or flee for the hills, depending on whether the threat was Martians or irradiated giant ants. Authority is now a distributed network, to use an old buzzphrase, and no more so than opinion journalism. (To use another cliché: Some readers interpret a StarTribune editorial as damage, and route around it.) Opinion is now in such abundant supply that there’s no reason to value a newspaper editorial above a Powerline reposte."
"Unsigned institutional editorials on Deep Global Matters are an anachronism, a vestige of the top-down, shut-up-and-listen era when newspapers monopolized the municipal ear. Those days are done. The entire idea of an editorial board, with its overtones of egghead think-tanks staffed with MacNamara clones, may have worked for the Univac era. But those were the days of The Authorities. You know: whenever there was a problem in a sci-fi movie, someone Alerted the Authorities. That meant the big omniscient grey seamless apparatus with a million meshing parts. The Army, the Government, the FBI, the TV stations, the newspapers, the guy who got on the loudspeaker and told everyone to stay in their homes or flee for the hills, depending on whether the threat was Martians or irradiated giant ants. Authority is now a distributed network, to use an old buzzphrase, and no more so than opinion journalism. (To use another cliché: Some readers interpret a StarTribune editorial as damage, and route around it.) Opinion is now in such abundant supply that there’s no reason to value a newspaper editorial above a Powerline reposte."
This entry was posted by Kevin Creighton, on
6.23.2005.
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