Jonah Goldberg is ticked, in a professional way, about a deafening silence that seems to erupt whenever The Corner wins something in blog categories. See here, here.
One of his many correspondents sends the following missive, reprinted below in its entirety:
Why don't hardcore bloggers consider The Corner a
blog? Well, ya'll are missing a couple of key
elements that separate you from the rest of the
blogosphere: a blogroll and links within posts to
other blogs.Beyond occasional links to Glenn Reynolds, The Corner
writers rarely connect with the rest of the
blogosphere. You have no one to blame but yourselves
for this reputation.
The Great Rooster of Africa (i.e. Goldberg) responds in a manner that I can't quite read. I get the sense that, while he receives (in the manner of actually reading them) correspondent's conclusions, he does not concur. He also notes that the writer's second point is incorrect, and I wholeheartedly concur. Yours truly was the receipt of a Corner-based link, over the "Yankee Kathy" thing. Ms. Lopez reached from the top of the highest mountain down into the lowest valley, and boosted my traffic considerably; for this I am eternally grateful.1 (Promised subscription to come once the current one runs out and my finances stabilize after the Christmas holidays. Let's go Red Sox!)
At this point, I must say that I respectfully depart from Mr. Goldberg's position, and say that I essentially believe the critique offered by his anonymous correspondent. I do not say that the critique offers objective reasons for "hating" The Corner, but rather that it offers a glimpse at the probable mindset of the so-called "hardcore" bloggers. I generally eschew any sort of "hardcore" label, whether it be for fandom of railroading, combat flight simulation, or blogging. The latter is, of course, concurrent with my general disdain for the notion that blogging represents some sort of "New Journalism" that will change the world.
Why am I so apathetic about it? Primarily because I've heard it all before. Having read Hunter S. Thompson's correspondence from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, I pick up on a lot of riffs from then that I hear now in fevered discussions of "the power of the blogosphere". HST (and by extension, Tom Wolfe) figured Freak Power/New Journalism would sweep things away and we'd have a new alignment of media. Thirty-five to forty years later, the hated Washington Post still survives and Thompson writes columns for ESPN.
National Review (and by extension its internet presence) doesn't need the approval of bloggers. Indeed, the bloggers should hope for a favorable mention from NR/NRO every so often, a little like something from the Pope thrown to the masses in a far-away diocese. After all, without National Review, these ardent back-bench tyes in the blog field would be discussing whether we should bankrupt America in 2005 to ensure that the Great Society stayed enshrined and the New Deal ensconced as the greatest ideal of American political action, or if we should wait until 2006 to do it. Similarly, I got this sense of the near-worship of President Ronald Reagan amongst big-name blog "conservatives", and apparently this must qualify them as authentic conservatives. It bemuses me to remember that without NR and its influence in the 1960s, there would have been no Goldwater '64 ticket, and without Goldwater '64 there could have been no Reagan '76 or Reagan '80.
Put bluntly, NR and its organs are probably above criticism from a bunch of blogger-come-latelies whose idea of a Kirk as a leadership figure is James Tiberius, not Russell. I'm struck by the role reversal here: For a bunch of bloggers to slate NR over the lack of a blogroll or enough link reciprocity (which was wrong, anyways) appears to be an anonymous industrial shortline serving a steel plant telling the Pennsylvania Railroad that, "You don't count; you're not up to our standards." Once you stop laughing, it's absolutely ridiculous.
What is a blog? It is, to paraphrase the Clinton '92 message, "The content, stupid!" It's not a blogroll or whether a particular blog satisfies some arcane standard of link reciprocity, but whether there's good content or not. The Corner is an adjunct to a conservative opinion leader, and yet still manages to steal the thunder of the so-called pajamahadeen. I bet it's outright jealousy, cloaked in opprobrium over the lack of a blogroll. How dare National Review trespass upon the turf of these amateurs, and take awards that should be had because I have a blogroll and Sitemeter and I'm a member of some blogging alliances and I have blogads and I'm on a first-name basis with Glenn, Virginia, Hugh, and all the others!
I'll steal from an old endorsement I read in a George Will column: "National Review, with all thy faults!"2 These "hardcore" bloggers would do well to remember that, "If they can see so far, it is because they stand upon the shoulders of a giant." That giant is National Review.
UPDATE: Various others have responded to this, but it's not a big deal yet, according to Technorati. TacJammer has a dissenting opinion (from mine, that is), as does Dust in the Light. Alas.
1 There's your daily dose of Nixon. Re-elect the President, because America needs a sense of history, not histrionics.
2 Faults such as John J. Miller, Stephen Moore, Andrew Stuttaford, and Friedrich Hayek.
Posted by Country Pundit at December 6, 2004 11:19 AM