At the risk of giving over this week’s blogging entirely to surveying opinions about bloggers by writers for the Washington Post Co., two more caught my attention today. First there’s David Broder in this morning’s Post (though of course available at Post.com last night), lamenting the polarization of politics in Washington and touting apparent countervailing forces:
Now … you can see the independence party forming — on both sides of the aisle. They are mobilizing to resist not only Bush but also the extremist elements in American society — the vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers on the left and the doctrinaire religious extremists on the right who would convert their faith into a whipping post for their opponents.
And in a dispatch filed late this afternoon, Slate’s John Dickerson described Hugo Chávez’s United Nations speech thusly:
“It smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of,” he said, as he stood at the U.N. lecturn where Bush spoke the day before. It was hard to tell which was stranger, that the United Nations had let a blogger take control of the podium, or that the delegates who are famously comatose and unresponsive during General Assembly speeches stirred themselves to applaud the diatribe.
Broder is referring specifically to the Lamontsters, while Dickerson didn’t bother to make any ideological distinctions. What’s to be gleaned from this? Not much, really. It shouldn’t be news to anyone that bloggers are viewed skeptically by the mainstream reporters they so frequently criticize. Nor should conservative bloggers be surprised they’re easily lumped in with their more widely-covered counterparts. I do find these references somewhat annoying, but the stereotypes didn’t come out of thin air. And will the bloggers-are-crazy meme ever go away? I certainly have my doubts.
As for WaPoCo’s third major property, Newsweek, there’s nothing especially notable from them blog-wise today — although I am at least a little disappointed to see they appear to have discontinued their blog roundup.
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