SteveSilver.net

Not That We Missed Him, But...

Our old friend Mr. Snitch is back. The former commenter here, who saw it fit to follow my friends to their sites and insult them, has for some reason posted an exegesis of my seven-month-old "In Defense of MSM" piece. And I'm still stratching my head as to what his point was...

Like many bloggers who specialize in "fiskings" Snitch, then as now, replies to the piece he wishes he'd read, rather than the one he actually did. Rather than viewing my piece as a plea for greater coexistence and less sniping between the blog and mainstream media worlds- both of which I'm a part of- he sees it as an anti-blog smackdown by a "mainstream media" figure eager to reduce and/or eliminate the influence of blogs.

Then again, it's hard to take the post seriously, since Snitch calls me "a journalistic insider," a "poster boy for the belief system [of the press], and also "fairly well-known, young New York Times stringer." I'm as far as possible from any kind of insider, I'm certainly not the "poster boy" for anything, and I do not write for the New York Times and never have. In fact, as the piece that Snitch has already "fisked" twice makes perfectly clear, I have never at any time been employed by any major "MSM" organization. And while I'd certainly dispute the notion that I am in any way "fairly well-known," I suppose any notoriety I have achieved has much more to do with my blogging than any of my non-blog writing work.

His most wrongheaded paragraph of all?

Silver never wrote anything in his blog that could not have been published, space and interest permitting, by one of his clients.

Yes, I'd have really loved it if my former bosses at Royal Media Group (a business publisher) or Argus Media (an energy industry news service) had published some of my film criticism or allowed a weekly column about the Eckstein Award. But no, in my paid writings I have generally stuck to stuff on subjects that would never in a million years be published on this blog, and vice versa. Unless Snitch is prepared to call out SportsByBrooks.com as a clandestine wing of the powerful, leftist, mainstream media, he's going to have to admit defeat on this particular point.

And on top of that, there's that annoying righty-blog tendency to take one article published by one author in one publication and treat that as the institutional, 100%-approved opinion of the MSM hive mind. "MSM said this. MSM reported that." Does he really think that what Wired magazine said in 2001 about the future of online media was shared at the time by everyone who worked at the New York Times and all the other MSM organizations? Is Wired even part of MSM, any more than the average blog is?

Additionally, Snitch pretends that the commenters who criticized my MSM piece were all my own regular readers, who had viciously turned against me when I revealed my pro-MSM true colors. Actually, no- since that piece was linked by dozens of other blogs, including many high-traffic conservative sites, the majority of the commenters were no doubt first-timers.

And finally, Snitch shares that the "MSM" has in recent months brought blogs into the fold, and chosen to work with them rather than against them. Wasn't that my point, that they have been all along?

Posted by Stephen Silver at September 2, 2005 12:00 AM