Here’s Lileks, on the Sunday New York Times:
“The Sunday Times is the weekly sermon: let us reinforce your world view, your sense of belonging to the Thinking Class, the Special Ones. Let the Red Staters spend Sunday morning in itchy church clothes at Perkins, dumping syrup all over their pancakes and yelling at little Lurleen not to pour salt down her baby brother’s jumper; you’re in your elegant spare little apartment with a cup of coffee (frothed on top; sprinkle of nutmeg) and a pastry from that wonderful place around the corner (okay, it’s an Au Bon Pain – hell, they’re all Bon Pain now) and there’s some light jazz on the radio. Morning jazz, if you had to give the genre a name. Anyway, it’s a sunny fall morning – well, noonish. Now comes the capstone moment when you lay the slab of the Times in your lap and begin the autoposy of the week. Scan the A section headlines - yes, yes, yes, appalling. Scan the metro: your eyes glaze. The arts section – later. Travel – Greece again? Good for Greece. Six pounds of classifieds: discard. No comics . . . there was always comics on Sunday back home. But that was IOWA, for heaven’s sake, what else would you expect but Blondie and Ziggy and the rest . . . ah.”Funny stuff there. It’s why I don’t ever buy the print edition of the Times- I figure any given Sunday it’s going to consist of roughly 95% SSTIDCA (Stupid Shit That I Don’t Care About), from the automotive section to Styles all the way down to Maureen Dowd’s latest faux-Shakespearian nonsense. I’ll never consider the print edition of the Times my lone authority on what’s going on in the world, but the 5% I do care about is enough to get me checking the website several times a day.
The magazine bit on blogs from Sunday, however, goes in the 95% category. The piece had almost no new information, almost completely ignored the conservative side of the Blogosphere, and was chock-full of tiresome psychoanalysis of Ana Marie Cox, Josh Marshall, and others. Great cover photo, though.
Yes, treatments of blog culture tend to be lackluster when they come from the mainstream media (I refuse to use the stupid acronym “MSM”). But one exception is this recent Star Tribune effort.
Posted by Stephen Silver at September 27, 2004 10:48 PMMy favorite was watching Charles Johnson whine about how he wasn't even mentioned in the article, and try to spin it as "the liberal media" -- which don't forget is "The Enemy" -- crushing conservablog culture. Might I offer a counteranalysis? You weren't mentioned because the author actually read your web site and decided that you're dumb, quasi-racist, and that you suck.
Posted by: John-Paul Pagano at September 29, 2004 03:34 AMCheck out the Nick Coleman article in Today's Star Tribune. I wonder who stuck the burr up his behind. I'm not sure I would categorize your blog in the realm of his critique, but he does make some solid points. Like anything there is a lot of crap out there, but also some very solid commentary and critical thinking.
I enjoy reading your blog. I cam to it via the Aaron Gleeman site.
Posted by: Mike at September 29, 2004 10:38 AM