According to Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal, if you blog, you’re a dork. If that’s not bad enough, if you read them, you’re an asshole. What would you rather be? Unfortunately, I guess I am both, because I am guilty of both. I find this interesting coming from a publication that is still trying to sell content that people can get for free elsewhere. Ideologically, I agree with the Journal’s editorial pages on most economic and political issues, but they totally underestimate the power of the Web. On the other hand, practically all traditional publications are guilty of this myopia. Or is it wishful thinking, similar to what canal ship owners had about trains and trains had about airplanes (in the hope that the web is just a fad)?

Rago paints with a broad brush, attacking blogs in general at will, and his criticism seems to cross ideological lines. He generally (and apparently genuinely) doesn’t like blogging as a medium, although the Wall Street Journal does have its own blogs. Rago is right, up to a point, there are certainly numerous blogs that are not worth the space. This was pointed out very clearly in David A. Utter’s article on Webpronews.com (an excellent article). Rago’s basic premise is that blogs are largely made up of unaccountable people with insufficient skills and significant axes to grind. This is a dangerous formula in the eyes of the media elite.

But isn’t that the case with all media? Some mediums are great and some sources are disastrous and there are many more to be found in between. Was there content excellence and quality control when Dan Rather was involved in a fabricated story about the president’s military service record? Or was he responsible when CNN showed footage of terrorists killing US troops? And every year there is list after list of stories about irresponsible journalism made up of plagiarism or even lies. I doubt anyone will soon forget the exploits of Jayson Blair, the young man who shattered the credibility (with accusations of plagiarism and falsehoods) of one of the country’s largest-circulation and most-respected newspapers, The New York Times. Point? All media, institutional and popular, are vulnerable to irresponsible behavior. No medium, including print, is in a position to look down on others.

The difference is that most people take institutional media and popular media (such as blogs) very seriously with a grain of salt. Because of this, I actually think blogging is “safer” as people tend to take institutional media statements as “gospel”. The reason it’s easy to criticize popular media is that there are so many and virtually no institutional mechanisms to hold them accountable (eg publishers, lawyers, advertisers, etc.). The lesson I learn is that I need to be careful what I read and weigh the credibility of the content and the writer very seriously. That’s a lesson I learned long before I even heard the word “blog.”