The MSM isn't getting it...

Last weekend, Josh Brodesky wrote a piece for the Arizona Daily Star that excoriated blogs, particularly political blogs like Blog for Arizona (full disclosure: I'm a guest writer at BfA), for being biased and unprofessional.

Blogs? Biased and unprofessional? 

Blogs????


No sh!t, Sherlock.


To its credit, the Star has published the insightful response of Michael Bryan, the blog "owner" of BfA.

David Safier of Blog for Arizona has an equally insightful, and more direct, rebuttal of Brodesky's diatribe.

My take:

I started writing my own insightful and sharp response.  It was also long and boring, even pedantic.

That response has been deleted.

The bottom line is that blogs are exactly what the writers want them to be - outlets for partisan commentary, observations on life (or just a part of it), places to rant (this blog was started as a vent for all of the frustration that had built up from watching the insanity that is the Arizona political scene) or outlets for cooking tips or whatever.

While some, like this one, make occasional forays into areas that used to be the exclusive territory of "professional" media (covering public meetings and legislative developments), nearly all of us are more like columnists than street-level reporters.

Mr. Brodesky criticizes blogs, which he admits he doesn't read often, for not being like his newspaper, yet he doesn't even allude to the fact that many blogs break stories that MSM reporters don't want to touch (like David Safier's coverage of the misuse of tuition tax credit $), many times because of their own biases or even because they're afraid that writing something that could offend one of the people they need as a source.

Anyway, I can see that I'm already getting pedantic again, so let me close this with an open question for Mr. Brodesky and anyone else who cares to answer:

If the "traditional" media should be held up as an example of integrity and professionalism that all bloggers should aspire to (and be ashamed for not achieving), why is it that ABC News, ostensibly a mainstream media organization, has brought Andrew Breitbart on board to be part of their election coverage?

You know, the same Breitbart who selectively edited video to smear Shirley Sherrod, a career employee of the Department of Agriculture?

You know, the same Breitbart who seems to have done the same thing in Alaska over the weekend, editing a garbled recording of some reporters into a conspiracy against tea party/GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller?


I'm openly partisan, as are the other writers at BfA, as are the writers of the other political bloggers in AZ (left and right).

Most of us do NOT play with the facts.

Unlike folks like Andrew Breitbart, who is about to become part of Mr. Brodesky's mainstream media.