The Shafer-Rosen Blog War

On Wednesday, Jack Shafer of Slate fired this broadside across the bows of the Hautes Bloggeurs who attended the "Blogging, Journalism, and Credibility" conference at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, including Jay Rosen, for whom Shafer had these unkind words five years ago in another Slate column. In Wednesday's article, Shafer invited the Blogosphere to "rip [his] flesh", and linked bloggers' comments in updates to the article.

After Shafer linked one of the Dread Pundit Bluto's posts to Slate, he emailed me to clarify his position and point out where I had erred. I updated that post, and a subsequent post. Meanwhile, Rosen posted a comment to the same post with a link to an earlier piece he had done.

Each wants the Dread Pundit Bluto to take his side.

But they're both wrong. Shafer and Rosen worship at the altar of the heathen idol Advocacy Journalism, a bloodthirsty deity, which has corrupted modern journalism; as I've pointed out here and here and here and especially, here. Advocacy Journalism and its besotted, elitist sire Interpretive Reporting have murdered objectivity, and institutionalized bias. Blogs need to expose the bias.

The Dread Pundit Bluto remains convinced that the most glorious mission of the blog is to watch the watchers.