Recently, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau published a strip criticizing bloggers for their lack of journalistic skills and business acumen (I can make money doing this?) You can check it out at http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20050703 . This is an example of how the corporate media are running scared when it comes to the bloggers are developing (not me, I suck at this) in creating national political dialogue. The Downing Street Memo would have disappeared if weren't for the persistence of the bloggers. As I reported earlier in "90 Miles An Hour into A Media Stonewall" when I mentioned the Downing Street memos in passing in an email to the local press, the editor emailed me back wanting proof of the Memo.
One point that Trudeau tries to make is that if bloggers were serious journalists, they would go to school and get a job at a newspaper. In Noam Chomsky's "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?" he states that the purpose of college is to weed out those who won't follow the line. The corporate media tries to influence endless stories of celebrity trials and runaway brides and any other pointless story that diverts attention away from the fact that Karl Rove is the traitor who leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press. Or that Bush has already started covert operations in Iran designed to prepare for that impending illegal invasion.
But the corporate media has started up the propaganda machine for Iran already as Bush makes his case for an invasion of Iran at the G-8 conference. "We cannot let Iran develop nuclear weapons," his brave pronouncement as he begins another round of lies designed to tricking the people into sending their children to die for no apparent reason. Iran doesn't have or want nuclear weapons. What it wants is nuclear power. None of this will be reported by Garry Trudeau or other corporate media lackey elitists.
The other point is that bloggers don't make a lot of money (if any) so what they do can't be considered serious journalism. I say it's the other way around. Serious jopurnalism doesn't include copying White House or corporate press releases verbatim and call that reporting. Serious journalism doesn't include runaway brides, scare of the weeks, celebrity scandals, or any kind of sports reporting. Serious reporting is like Greg Palast, the guy who uncovered the scrubbed voter rolls in Florida. Serious journalism is a thousand bloggers providing a link to the Downing Street Memo, at no charge to their readers.
I don't do this for the money. I don't know if anyone actually reads this crap. But I do like to write and I do like to give my opinion, this gives me a chance to do both. What Mr. Trudeau's strip reflected to me was a fear of blogs evetually replacing the print medium. With no newspapers to print his strip, he would be out of a job. Then, he would have to get a real one. Then we can see how much money Mr. Trudeau can make.
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3 comments:
ummmmmmmmmm
Gary is an anti-war, , anti-religion, anti-government, anti-establishment guy.
He just so happened to make money off his art.
If you, who fits the same mold, had the same luck, would it not too make you what you acuse gary of being.
Well profitier, most blogs are anti-war, anti-religion, anti-government, anti-establishment or one or two of the above. He is the one (in the establishment he is supposedly so against) levying criticisms against bloggers, I took offense. In a country where you have a traitor like Karl Rove in the White House and a liar like Bush, why is he picking on the little guy (who has to eat cat food, for chrissakes) instead of going after the true criminals? If he were truly anti-war, he would throw his support bloggers who are trying to get the message out about the road our country is going down. Mr. Trudeau was not lucky, he attended Yale, for chrissakes, he is part of the establishment, therefore even if he felt so compelled to do a piece about, say Bush's dillemna concerning his tough stance on capital punishment vis-a-vis the whole Karl Rove scandal, the piece would be killed by his editors.
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