Joesph Rago

Assistant editorial features editor at

The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Rago takes issue with bloggers and generalizes about individuals who write blogs.

The Blog Mob “Written by fools to be read by imbeciles.” BY JOSEPH RAGO

Mr. Rago begins his article with an insult and name calling in his title and sub-title. Here are snippets from the body of Rago’s article.  

Blogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg’s press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there’s more of it, because anybody can chip in. There’s more “choice”–and in a sense, more democracy.

Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the “MSM,” for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .  

Mr. Rago’s pomposity standout in his opening paragraphs, blogger have touched a nerve regardless of Rago’s admission.  

The way we write affects both style and substance. The loquacious formulations of late Henry James, for instance, owe in part to his arthritis, which made longhand impossible, and instead he dictated his writing to a secretary. In this aspect, journalism as practiced via blog appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form. Its closest analogue might be the (poorly kept) diary or commonplace book, or the note scrawled to oneself on the back of an envelope–though these things are not meant for public consumption. The reason for a blog’s being is: Here’s my opinion, right now.

Mr. Rago generalizes, depicting all bloggers as diary keepers passing through a drive-up window on the information highway, lacking intelligence and substance.   

The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element–here’s my opinion–is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought–instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings [sic]of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

Instead of generalizing, Mr. Rago should take time to analyze some blogs or others before suggesting we are a “mob element.”   

The petty interpolitical [sic] feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.

More name calling and generalization. The idiocy may be in the eye of the beholder. Mirror, mirror on the wall…………..   

Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line. Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions–John Kerry always providing useful material–while leaving underexamined [sic] more fundamental issues, say, Iraq. Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.  Leftward fatuities too are easily found: The fatuity matters more than the politics. If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad’s judgment of newspapering–”written by fools to be read by imbeciles”–they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.

Mr. Rago takes both political sides to task, his feeble attempt at “fair and balanced.”  

Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.  Of course, once a technosocial [sic] force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we’ve allowed decay to pass for progress.

Accordingly, Mr. Rago feels the MSN is still the best alternative for news and opinion. The general population, no matter how educated, is uninformed and ludicrous because we didn’t attend journalism school. I suppose I should burn my MBA from Northwestern and stop blogging because I’m purportedly unqualified to opine and “journal.”

In Mr. Rago’s opinion blogs don’t qualify for “newpapering” I might suggest the New York Times and other “elitist” journals of print are better suited for “wallpapering” the out house or flooring in the bird cage.

Furthermore, has Mr. Rago surfed cable news lately?  We can watch enough “blabber” and hot air, as well as the rehashing of the same story with each news hour and change of anchor. What is “reporting” and what is news? What is relevant and what is not?

Do we leave it up to Mr. Rago and the MSM to tell us what’s correct and not?

I conclude with this quote from Coach Bob Knight:   “All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.”     

• In 1998 when Reid bought undeveloped residential property on Las Vegas’ booming outskirts for about $400,000. Reid bought one lot outright, and a second parcel jointly with Brown. One of the sellers was a developer who was benefiting from a government land swap that Reid supported.
• In 2001, Reid sold the land for the same price to a limited liability corporation created by Brown. The senator didn’t disclose the sale on his annual public ethics report or tell Congress he had any stake in Brown’s company. He continued to report to Congress that he personally owned the land.
• After getting local officials to rezone the property for a shopping center, Brown’s company sold the land in 2004 to other developers and Reid took $1.1 million of the proceeds, nearly tripling the senator’s investment. Reid reported it to Congress as a personal land sale.

The Reid denial began early on when he hung up the phone when questioned about the deal during an AP interview. Senate ethics rules require lawmakers to disclose on their annual ethics report all transactions involving investment properties, regardless of profit or loss, and to report any ownership stake in companies.

The Dirty Details:

Kent Cooper, who oversaw government disclosure reports for federal candidates for two decades in the Federal Election Commission, said Reid’s failure to report the 2001 sale and his ties to Brown’s company violated Senate rules.

Reid and his wife, Landra, personally signed the deeds selling their full interest in the property to Brown’s company, Patrick Lane LLC, for the same $400,000 they paid in 1998, records show.

Despite the sale, Reid continued to report on his public ethics reports that he personally owned the land until it was sold again in His disclosure forms to Congress do not mention an interest in Patrick Lane or the company’s role in the 2004 sale.