Why elitistsfear bloggers

I was to present the Pew Center's findings about the future of the Internet this week, but it will have to wait.

Instead I must address the misbegotten musings of author Andrew Keen, who appeared on the PBS "Newshour" a week ago Monday, promoting his new book "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture."

Keen, a British-American, has criticized Web 2.0 -- the so-called second generation of popular Web-based communities and services -- as something that "worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone -- even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us -- can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 'empowers' our creativity, it 'democratizes' media, it 'levels the playing field' between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is 'elitist' traditional media."

For me, the most outlandish thing Keen said in his appearance on the "Newshour" was, "The Internet has 70 million blogs ... no one cares what you had for breakfast."

This dismissal of blogging is wildly off the mark.

I understand where he is coming from. Lately many elite journalists have been attacking blogs, especially politically liberal blogs, as "vitriolic," "rabid" and "crude." Keen went to great pains to offer the "real" journalism of the Wall St. Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post as examples of what blogging is not.

He said on the "Colbert Report" last month that "I think we need objective, professional journalists who responsibly collect the news rather than anonymous bloggers often in the pay of corporations and foreign governments. That's the crisis."

Keen here is being disingenuous and paranoid, as many are who criticize blogging. Successful bloggers are far from anonymous.

What's more, Keen is conflating the anonymous blog commentators with the well-known blog authors who run the Web sites. He derides the democratization of this freewheeling commentariat, considering it drivel.

Here I have to agree with him. Many of the comments posted on blog sites can be inane, but on some of the finer blogs the comments are well worth wading through. Not only can they be intelligent, but they also often draw the original authors back into the fray to defend their positions.

When Andrew Keen attacks bloggers, saying, "No one wants to know what you had for breakfast," he's ignoring the fact that many bloggers are professional journalists, and many others come to the party perfectly well-equipped to promulgate an idea or construct an opinion. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has been published in Time; Duncan Black of Eschaton has a Ph.D. in Economics; Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos is an Army veteran, an accomplished pianist, and boasts a law degree from Boston College; libertarian Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit teaches law at Tennessee; Glenn Greenwald of Salon is a veteran constitutional lawyer; and conservative Atlantic Monthly blogger Andrew Sullivan is the former editor of the New Republic.

Often these bloggers not only add to the debate but also provide fact filters that catch our "professional" journalists when they're lazy, inaccurate or just plain dishonest. Andrew Keen and the rest of the elitists can't abide this and want the hoi polloi to be kept in its place.

The Internet adds to our wealth of information. We simply need to assess it critically, as we should any information source.

(Ross can be reached at calross@napanet.net.)

Napa Valley Register Copyright © 2009