Blogger pride.



Followed a link on Instapundit to this blog post by Tom Humphrey, the Knoxville News Sentinel's Nashville bureau chief (read: traditional media). He's been sent to blog the NY convention. He writes:



"But, what the heck, if I’m going to sit here the evening before deserting my family for almost a week to watch Republican worship ceremonies for George W. Bush, not so long Democratic devotional on caring for John Kerry, might as well ramble a bit.



After all, bloggers, I am instructed, do not have to follow those ironclad rules of attribution, fact-checking, logic and such that burden the daily production of stuff to print by traditionally ink-stained wretches. You can just babble like a talk show radio guy."



Yep. That's what we do, just babble like morons for your pleasure, we don't fact check before we post, like traditional media (say the DI??).



Rebuttal posts are raining down hard and fast, with examples here, here and here.



I particularly like James Lilek's response, which goes beyond the blogger slam to critique the rest of the rhetoric:



"It’s interesting for several reasons: 1. the site is described as a “web-only blog,” which of course makes it distinctive from blogs disseminated by carrier pigeon or smoke signals. 2. we learn that the bureau chief for a major newspaper has trouble writing clearly. My bureau chief in DC would have sent back that first paragraph with several red question marks indicating she had no idea what the words between the first and last comma actually meant. The second graf is even better: “logic and such that burden the daily production of stuff to print by traditionally ink-stained wretches.” Wow. The daily production of stuff to print. And by who? Wretches. What kind? Ink-stained! Why? Because it’s a cliché. And how are they ink-stained? Traditionally! Yes, we’re all taken to the basement where we have our palm sliced with an old piece of linotype; ink is daubed into the wound, and we face a portrait of Joseph Pulitzer while holding our genitals in our left hand."