Why Sam Donaldson is Wrong

Daniel Drezner has a nice thoughtful blog on just what blogs do. Sam Donaldson is in the title of my piece because Dan Rather's Dumber Texas Sidekick [And Rather is very dumb] noted this morning on George Stephanopoulos's panel that the "blogosphere really is helping the left." Sam, as usual, got it half right. [Why SD is still on ABC is one of those mysteries beyond speculation, as beneath the power of thought.]

Dan quotes a fellow named Arnold Kling who is quoted in the Drezner blog, but has his most interesting insight in his unquoted comment:

Blogs might threaten the hierarchy, because there is nothing to stop a low-level analyst's blog from becoming more popular than that of a senior vice-president.

That quote above was about corporate blogs, but Kling is more trenchant about mass media

From the standpoint of pure efficiency of disseminating information, it is not clear to me that the mass media model beats a blog-based model.

Jack Shafer of Slate views blogging in terms of globalization:

But the prospect of a million amateurs doing something akin to their job unsettles the guild, making it feel like Maytag's factory rats whose jobs were poached by low-paid Chinese labor.

Then Jack quotes Michael Kinsley's well-known observation concerning:

Web populists replacing professional writers, saying that when he goes to a restaurant, he wants the chef to cook his entree, not the guy sitting at the next table.

Finally, it all boils down to authority, and Shafer notes:

When there are millions of aspiring chefs in the room willing to make your dinner for free, a least a hundred of them are likely to deal a good meal. Mainstream publishers no longer have a lock on the means of production, making the future of reading and viewing anybody's game. To submit a tortured analogy, it's like the Roman Catholic Church after Gutenberg. Soon, everyone starts thinking he's a priest.

Unlike Gresham's Law, bad blogs don't drive out the good, "ex cathedra's" cannot suppress readership, and some home-grown Menckens and Lippmanns may sprout some orchidaceous journalism that no gatekeepers can blacklist.

I find most of my blogs suffer from my tendencies to be judgmental or my lapses in self-editing. My voluble blarney gene hypes when "less is more" should prevail. But the era of authoritarian or apodictic controls over speech is receding, although China, Cuba, North Korea and a few other jurisdictions [like Harvard and Yale FAS discussions] may still be voiceless or governed by political guidelines.