Fraters Libertas

In the Blogosphere, No One Can Hear You Scream (Except Other Bloggers)

During lunch today I had the car radio on and heard Rush Limbaugh referring to David Frum, who was writing about J. Bradford DeLong, who had been blogging about Hillary Clinton.

(When you good people pass along word of my post to your friends, please tell them you read Saint Paul blogging about Rush Limbaugh, referring to David Frum, writing about J. Bradford DeLong, blogging about Hillary Clinton. Yes, that puts me fourth in line in passing along a rather standard critical analysis of the former First Lady’s performance as an administrator (in short, Hillary – bad), but given the august company in this informational string, to paraphrase Steve Martin in 'The Jerk,' I’d just like to be in there somewhere.)

Above and beyond the original Delong editorial that started this parade of citations, the significance of this event is that I heard Rush use a couple of words I’ve never heard him utter before: “blog” and “blogosphere.” I dare say these were the first time he’s ever used the terms, since he mouthed them both in a deliberate, halting, slightly mispronounced way, as if he’d just read about them and never heard them pronounced out loud before. Kind of like the way certain local radio talk show hosts pronounce “Frah ...tears .... Lee...beer...tahs”. (Although I’m not complaining, because in the blogosphere, any publicity is good publicity just as long as they spell your internet address right, which Mr. Thompson always does.).

Rush’s description of the blog world also left something to be desired. He started out by saying “blogs are written by people who can’t......” then he halted for some reason and began a new sentence. I suspect this was due to either an in studio distraction or because he wanted to start a new approach to a definition that was inadvertently coming off too negatively. I got the sense he was going to say “people who can’t get published elsewhere.” Which may sound rude, but it’s true for the most part, guys like Lileks notwithstanding. (However, what’s also true is that most bloggers aren’t trying to get published elsewhere, and don’t even think about it. Blogging is an avocation and an end to itself, which I suppose is a win-win situation since the mainstream media marketplace would largely reject them anyway).

Rush then boiled it all down for the people by saying something to effect that ‘blogs give people the opportunity to write editorials and opinion and they’re mostly read by other people doing these things - blogs.’ Then he said something like ‘I guess some of these blogs are considered more influential than others.’ Meaning I suppose, he doesn’t consider any of them influential, since he’s not reading them.

I wouldn’t call Rush’s characterization of the blog world as necessarily negative, in fact I’d have to agree with what he said on a factual basis (yes, I admit it, Andrew Sullivan is considered slightly more influential than Fraters Libertas). But I would guess his seemingly skeptical and slightly dismissive tone stems from the fact he probably devotes the majority of his waking hours to digesting the elite of the mainstream media (multiple newspapers, magazines, TV, news radio) and therefore it’s hard for him to understand how blogs can contribute anything else.

Meaning, to his detriment, Rush hasn’t been reading Instapundit, where the potential for blogging as a fact checking, collective intelligence gathering, alternate opinion creating engine of truth and insight has been in discussion (and on display) for quite some time.

But Rush is a smart guy, I’m sure he’ll catch on eventually. At which time he'll only be a couple of years behind Hugh Hewitt in this regard.