One of the most common complaints about blogs is that we’re essentially parasites; without the mainstream media, we’d be talking about our pets. I generally agree.
But every once in a while, bloggers get to a story first. Just yesterday, for example, Andrew Sullivan revealed the surprising news that Howard Dean, presidential candidate and governor of Vermont, is fluent in Haitian creole.
To be fair, I’m reading between the lines a little. I have to assume that Howard Dean speaks Haitian creole. Because if he doesn’t, Andrew’s criticism of a song in Creole doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. (I notice that respected economics professor Tyler Cowen loves Don Giovanni. To the Babelfish! Get ‘im!)
Jeez. Sullivan is not a stupid man, and I feel certain that he didn’t go to the Kennedy School of Government with the dream of dumbing down political discourse. And yet, here we are. As a wise man once said, “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind.”
Jack O’Toole has more.
UPDATE: Another scoop! The Bush administration and congressional investigators say that they don’t have sufficient evidence to connect Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, but Andrew has found the proof.
(That’s enough Andrew – Ed)
{ 12 comments }
Andrew Reeves 09.12.03 at 7:35 pm
Therein lies the key weakness of (solo) blogging: When you have no editor, no need to actually have some print organ publish, no accountability (and no, blogs of left and right persuasion sniping at each other doesn’t really count), then quality suffers since you can just churn out whatever comes to mind without really being called on it. With no corrective mechanisms, that which is shrill becomes even moreso and next thing you know, you’ve been taken by the Brain Eater.
jb 09.12.03 at 8:01 pm
Yeah, I like Sully, and read him regularly, but that particular post was just silly.
Which, I suppose, might be how he meant it.
Ophelia Benson 09.12.03 at 8:19 pm
Interesting. There are 18 digits in the URL for that link. So Sullivan has posted, what, a trillion trillion times? Busy guy.
Steve Laniel 09.12.03 at 10:25 pm
I think blogs are turning into a really great fact-checking mechanism, at least the portion of the blogging world that Crooked Timber, Volokh, Mark Kleiman, Dan Drezner, Brad DeLong et al. inhabit. These are all tremendously smart people, all of whom do a really good job pointing out the fallacies in mainstream media — of which there are many.
Mainstream media might still be good for actual initial-fact demonstration (event E happened in place P at time T), but they’re terrible for news analysis. I find myself skipping the commentary part of most news articles nowadays (the “what does this event MEAN” portion), and only reading the factual part. And for many of the factual parts, I now find that I don’t even need to read what a reporter writes — I can go on the net and find the actual text of Bush’s speech, and I don’t need to know what the reporter thinks is significant about that speech; I’ll make up my own mind about that, thank you very much.
I doubt that mainstream media are all that reliable. Whom do you trust more on drug policy: some journalism-school graduate with no scientific training, or Mark Kleiman? When discussing law, whom do you trust more: a non-lawyer, or Eugene Volokh? (If you think Volokh too partisan, try any number of other law professors with blogs. Jack Balkin, say.)
The mainstream media are slowly losing sectors in which they dominate. These days, I’m much more likely to check the New York Times headline, see that Bush delivered a speech, find the text of the speech, form my own opinions, then check various learned folks to see what they thought about it. The Times becomes a pointer to actual interesting content, rather than the provider of that content — kind of like how I’ll get recommendations from Amazon, then go to the Harvard Book Store to actually buy the book.
All right, that was my long ramble. I hope it went somewhere interesting.
Ophelia Benson 09.12.03 at 10:38 pm
Gosh, yeah, why can’t the Democrats see how it’s all connected? Huh? Why? All it takes is some Marines to spell it out for them, so why are they so like clueless?
neil 09.12.03 at 11:14 pm
I didn’t realize Andrew Sullivan was such a PC prude. But then again, that does seem to be the norm among the Republican standard-bearers these days, doesn’t it?
neil 09.12.03 at 11:41 pm
I just read through the lyrics while listening to the song again (it’s one of my favorite songs, but I couldn’t pick up most of the lyrics, only knowing French), and I think that even for Sullivan it’s spectacular how much he doesn’t get the song _at all_.
To me, the message sent by the song is similar to the message being sent by MEChA — be proud of your culture, don’t respond to pressure to cast it off in favor of your adopted country (pressure, as we see here, from people like Sullivan). There’s clearly nothing against non-Haitians in the song, and thus nothing against assimilation. Wyclef makes this point quite clearly: “You’re scared to say Haitian girls are beautiful / Beautiful girls are beautiful.” The tendency of repressed ethnic groups in America to be sexually attracted only to women of the dominant ethnic group has been documented by Alex Haley, among others. Is there anything “anti-assimilation” about criticizing that? If Andrew continues arguing this point, then he is basically defining “assimilation” as submission to the dominant race. I don’t think this is actually what he believes, though.
The thing is, I don’t think Andrew is necessarily misinterpreting this song. It seems with all the pointed references to Israel, the lyrics should be striking a familiar chord with him. (I somehow doubt he objects to Israeli identity politics.) I think that, as with those in an uproar over MEChA, he is threatened by immigrants and the contributions they might make to the American melting pot. This is an especially unfortunate example of present-day conservative ideology actively working against what has long been regarded an American point of pride.
Sully the hack 09.13.03 at 1:22 am
Hey give me a break. I only had a few minutes to think of a way of smearing Dean.
And by the way, renowned constitutional scholar Ann Coulter agrees with me about 9-11:
“On the basis of their recent pronouncements, the position of the Democratic Party seems to be that Saddam Hussein did not hit us on 9-11, but Halliburton did.”
http://www.anncoulter.org/columns/2003/091003e.htm
So there!
david` 09.13.03 at 4:05 am
Why do people keep saying Sully is smart, if he keeps saying stupid things? The stupidest, to my mind, was the religion bit in the NYT magazine after September 11. The fact that everyone bit on that idiocy reflects on everyone.
Eric 09.13.03 at 4:52 pm
Of course there is a link between 9/11 & Iraq: the fighters that could had intercepted the attack were all over in Iraq.
Karmakin 09.13.03 at 5:06 pm
Steve is right. Mainstream analysis sucks. There is a little bit that’s good. A tiny bit. People accuse the blogosphere of being an “echo chamber”. Well what does that make the mainstream media? A whole bunch of screaming inside one big ugly head?
Read This
It comes from the Rittenhouse Review, that is to the left, but it puts it succinctly. The blogosphere gives you a whole bunch of truly independent views, for the most part done with a degree of intelligence that is completely missed by anybody who is creating for mass consumption.
I agree completly. I’ll read the speeches and the reports myself, thank you very much. The mainstream media DOES have a place. It’s to tell us what where and when. Not how and why anymore.
sym 09.13.03 at 9:45 pm
The best part was his first post about the Wyclef song. Without knowing what language the song was in, Sully quoted the line “yo pa respekte Israel”, then basically accused Dean of hating Jews. It’s a reggae song. Of course it’s pro-Israel. When he posted the translation of the song, he did not mention how it completely contradicted his earlier take, or apologized for smearing Dean.
Great self-correcting mechanism my ass.
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