All Our Woes Are Caused by Blogs

Charles Cooper, Executive editor of CNET News.com reviews Andrew Keen's new polemic against new media in general and blogs in particular, "The Cult of the Amateur: How the democratization of the digital world is assaulting our economy, our culture, and our values."

Cooper's sympathetic look at Keen calls him an "...elitist--in the best sense of that term," as if "elitist" has any more shades of meaning than "terrorist." What Keen really is, is a snob, and not a particularly bright one, at that, as proven by this passage from his book:

These days, kids can't tell the difference between credible news by objective professional journalists and what they read on joeshmoe.blogspot.com."

Silly rabbit. "Objective professional journalists?" An extinct species, replaced by the "opportunistic, blown-dry agenda-pusher." The exposure of agenda journalism and resultant loss of power by big media is what gets Andrew's knickers in a bunch. That's why he's trying to lead the charge back to the twentieth century, when "objective professional journalists" brokered Presidential elections and determined major powers' foreign policies virtually unchallenged, and unaccountable.

That's why new media is essential. Without amateurs, no one would ever know about frauds like Dan Rather or the Israeli/Hizballah war fauxtography scandal being perpetrated in the name of "objective professional" journalism.

Blogs and internet amateurs are here to stay, despite the scandalized objections of troglodytes like Mr. Keen, who simply don't trust the little people to process information that isn't spoonfed to them by a network newsreader.