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September 07, 2005
Staring at the Sun
By "taking out" one couldn't be sure if Robertson meant putting a bullet into Chavez or financing a coup to oust him.
You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.
I'll always enjoy Sun Media's columnists page — when they manage to remember to update it, that is, and insert the correct links — but there are times when I wonder if it's worthwhile pointing out the idiocy I find there nearly every day. These people are paid practically nothing for their work, after all. But then, I think that actually makes it worse, since so many people out there are doing far better, for free, with virtually no crossover exposure to the 60,000 poor souls who read the Calgary Sun. (I speak ill of Sun Media in general, but to be fair, the Calgary Sun is to the Toronto Sun as, say, the Toronto Sun is to the Times of London.)
To my mind, the best thing about the blogosphere isn't the much-vaunted "interactivity", but the simple fact that it's a meritocracy. Likewise, while Canada's big media is very un-interactive — there are still astonishingly few columnists with MSM-sanctioned blogs — what gets my dander up is reading a newspaper more or less cover to cover without encountering a single novel idea.
To some extent this is the nature of the daily newspaper beast. Canada's can do better — it's not just Sun journalists whose socks are knocked off on a daily basis by Canadian bloggers — but it's almost inevitable that smart people with blogs are fairly regularly going to outshine smart people with deadlines. That's why all columnists should have blogs, or at the very least commit themselves (as Barbara Kay does, for example) to answering every substantial e-mail they receive. That's also why the Calgary Sun should consider ditching its op/ed pages completely (or, preferably, burning its premises to the ground and salting the charred earth on which they stood). Those who want witty, reactionary right-wing material can get far, far better in the blogosphere for free. If that's what the people want, then those bloggers deserve to be paid their 75 bones for a Calgary Sun column — or else no one does.
Posted by Chris Selley at September 7, 2005 09:31 PM
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Comments
Where did you get the idea that the blogosphere was a meritocracy? A quick look at most of the top 10 blogs should disabuse you of that notion. Unless you're defining "merit" in an idiosyncratic way, the best do not necessarily float to the top.
Posted by: Matt McIntosh at September 8, 2005 09:20 AM
Assessing the merit of a weblog by any OTHER criteria than "how many people choose to read it" would seem to be idiosyncratic, if you ask me, and you didn't.
Posted by: Matt at September 8, 2005 10:49 AM
The fact that Britney Spears moves millions of albums does not mean she has artistic merit. Call that idiosyncratic if you like, but I call it discernment.
Posted by: Matt McIntosh at September 13, 2005 06:24 PM