Less than zero

Our hacks are not just bad, they're literally atrocious

Library of Congress

Back in the early 21st Century when blogging was a semi-demi-hemi-big deal —“citizen journalism”! Remember that one? Oh, how we laughed — one of the things us crazy kids enjoyed typing into our Blogspot and Movable Type templates was attacks on big media hacks. So many of those nobs had been pampered and petted and allowed to spew bilge for so long — for who in the cloistered world of Major League journalism was going to tell them they sucked, or even attempt to edit them — that once we urchins realized the internet had made us every bit as available to a mass audience as they were, it was hard not to blow raspberries at them every chance we got.

Back then my own racket was a bit more meta: I focused less of those beached whales than on other bloggers — specifically rightwing propagandists like Glenn Reynolds and Rod Dreher and Jim Lileks who were getting major ass-pats from big media (remember Time Magazine Bloggers of the Year Assrocket et alia?). I did that at least partly because, I realize in retrospect, I smelled a rat — though at the time, operating as I was on instinct and blind fury, I couldn’t articulate what bothered me so much about them besides the self-evident shoddiness of their thinking and execution.