Pete Hamill, of New Yorker fame, made an appearance on Morning Joe today and decided to jump on the bandwagon with Joe Scarborough’s daily tirade against “the Cheetos brigade.” (His name for bloggers.) Joe was talking about some mass e-mail he received with smears against one of the candidates, and then moved into saying how unreliable bloggers were, as if they were one in the same with the mass smear-mails. Hamill had the following to say about blogging:
It’s not journalism, it’s therapy.
It’s the literary style of a ransom note.
Never practice irony in an underdeveloped country. (The blogosphere.)
I really do like Morning Joe, but these endless attacks on bloggers with no rhyme, reason or examples is getting tiresome. Joe takes the time each day to have his producer read hateful e-mails that he receives, and without fail immediately lumps the letter writers in with “the Cheetos brigade” without batting an eye.
Say it ain’t so, Joe. You’re coming to the end of your shelf life. I interviewed Nancy Pfotenhauer and Bob Barr this week. Who’d you talk to? Pete Hamill? Nice get.
UPDATE: In the comments, Neocon (after some very nice compliments for TMV… thanks!) points out the following:
For now. Blogs are new frontiers. It’s the wild west and the sheriff hasn’t been hired yet to clean up the mess. Anything goes………and does.
And ChrisWWW adds, “Ego wars!” (which I’ll get to in a minute.)
Is there a wild west element to the blogosphere? Sure, and plenty of it. But when you get down to some of the really successful, high traffic blogs, (of which we’re proud to note that TMV is part of today) you see a lot less of it. And you’re getting a different product delivered to you than you find on the MSM. And yet Scarborough trots out these tired, hack metaphors on a daily basis about “coming out of your mom’s basement” or “wiping the cheeto dust on your chest hairs.”
Ego wars? Perhaps. But stop and think about this for a moment. In addition to the recent interviews some of us have done, I just this morning received confirmation that we’ll be interviewing Russ Verney on our radio show tomorrow. He’s Bob Barr’s campaign manager and ran the show for Ross Perot in 92 and 96. (Edit: Just found out that Russ will be on next week. Tomorrow we’ll be talking to Derek Barr… also a rep for the Barr campaign) I work regularly with Ed Morrissey on his show and he has interviewed damned near half of Congress by now and most of the presidential candidates. James Joyner can pick up a phone and reach pretty much anyone in the Senate on short notice. Rick Moran constantly gets called to be interviewed by the MSM. Ok, maybe you don’t want to call it “journalism” but if you only had the choices of that or “therapy” which would you say it’s closer to? We get these interviews and report back to you folks so that you can get an inside look at politics and campaign information in a format and style that you’ll never see on the alphabet networks’ evening news shows or these cable TV chattering class gab festivals. Joe Scarborough is talking to Tiki Barber tomorrow while Cindy and I talk to Derek Barr. Don’t get me wrong… I got nothing but love for the Tiki. But come on… Cheetos Brigade? Who’s doing the heavy lifting for the public in politics here?