Wednesday, September 15, 2004

What it isn't

I got slammed in an email this morning that essentially called me chickenshit for not piling onto Dan Rather and CBS for whatever it was they did (and continue to do) wrong.

Well, folks, it's not that I don't care. Or that I don't know anything. It's that I don't know enough, and I'm busy doing my job, which isn't blogging.

And it's not like nobody's on the case. I see Technorati finds 332 posts matching "Rathergate" alone.

My fave, of the few threads I've visited on the matter, is this one, following a cautious and responsible post by Dan Gillmor. Lots of intersting thoughts and perspectives in there.

Here's one more. Blogging isn't cable TV. We don't have to fill otherwise empty pipes with "content," and we don't have to hold eyeballs still while our customers stab them with advertising messages. Most of all, we don't have to join the ranks of the professionally opinionated, or the choirs of voices raised in righteous rage against political enemies.

We're free-range writers. If you don't like what we say or don't say, there are plenty of other potential sources of what you want, all gathered in a place that would never exist if it were up to the major media, the entertainment industry, the publishing industry, and the lawmakers and regulators who protect them all. (Even the writer who gave me shit wrote back later to report that he'd found what he wanted here.)

If there's any fer-sure "message" about this "medium," that's it.

Bonus link #1: Chris Nolan's The Blogosphere's First President: George W. Bush. Except for the first two sentences of the last paragraph (a prediction we'll have to wait and see play out), I agree with what she says.

Bonus links #s 2, 3 and 4s: Jay Rosen's Pressthink, Sheila Lennon's Shenews and Terry Heaton's Lost Remote and POMO blog. Always. Plus all the others who feel slighted not to have made that very short list.