Maybe the MSM isn't so bad afterall.

Roger L. Simon says that Pajamas Media has already had over 5 million hits. Well, I don't mind admitting that 10 or so of those hits have come from me, mainly in the "morbid fascination" department. It's always dangerous for an amateur blogger to attack other bloggers as "boring" -- particularly ones like me who don't blog so much as write non-pithy handwringing essays that only good friends would actually want to read. But nevertheless, it's quite remarkable how this collection of supposedly free-wheelin', anti-establishment libertarian bloggers could have taken their three and a half million dollars of venture capital and come up with something so incredibly, stultifyingly, jawdroppingly boring.

The site layout is boring. The newsfeeds are boring (and weirdly focused on China). The discussions are boring. And, frankly, the concept is boring. Everybody dislikes the media. Liberals hate the way politics and culture is covered. Conservatives hate the way politics and culture is covered. Unconnected milquetoast centrists like me hate the way politics and culture is covered. (I hate the way politics is covered in the US and Canada). The grievances we nurse might be different, but the bitching is pretty universal. So what exactly does the Pajamas Media have to add to this discussion besides a lot (and I mean a lot) of self-importance? Even the notion of these people as muckrakers googling in their pajamas is silly. Take the name "Pajamas media", a reference to the Dan Rather affair. They'll tell you their anger with the media isn't for its liberalism so much as for its arrogance. Yet they've been jonesing about their "victory" over CBS and how it's a harbinger for a New Populist Paradigm for going-on two years now. Of course, many of them are already either professional journalists or TV celebrities to begin with. Really, they're the right-leaning version of the Huffington Post, but with less spunk, a greater focus on ad revenue and apparently without the perspective to understand that, when you get down to it, they're basically just another blog.

As of today, a bunch of them are having a boring discussion about what went wrong with their launch: too corporate, too much regular news feed, not bloggy enough, etc. etc. And it's all just dull as hell until eventually Tammy Bruce chips in with something like this:

LOL Cliff! One thing I've noticed out the changes Pajamas has already gone through, and this is another caution from experience on the Left--is for Pajamas to not get too caught up in the perpetual cycle of self-criticism. One thing Leftist leadership has going for it, is that it doesn't give a damn what others think, and it certainly doesn't sit around wringing their hands abut whether or not people on the right respect or appreciate them. That gives them power to operate with a focus that gets things done. Bad things, mind you, but things none the less. I would encourage everyone at Pajamas, both conservative and liberal (whatever those labels mean these days) to stay focused on passion without feeling as though we need to adjust to make people (whoever) like us. Bloggers don'tt worry about that, and that's part of their power. Let's make sure we embody that as well.


For the record, when Bruce talks about the "left", she's not talking about International ANSWER. She's talking about her former life as a registered Democrat and NOW member before NewsMax and Fox made their offers. That is, she's actually complaining that Democrats and the mainstream liberal groups who support them never get caught up in cycles of self-criticism, that they don't give a damn what others (presumably outside the base) think, and that no liberal would sit around wringing their hands about whether or not people on the right respect or appreciate them. She says this from experience. But not, apparently, the experience of actually talking to a mainstream liberal, or reading any mainstream liberal commentary, in the past few years.

Later, Adam Bellow suggests that Pajamas' problem is that they're being dragged down by the rest of the behind-the-times online media:

When a new technology emerges, old formats are always applied to it at frst (remember the electronic typewriter?). Salon and Slate--enjoyable as they can be--represent old media formats applied to the digital medium. PJM is a step beyond that, though for a while we will continue to apply old media formulas to it (ie a reader response page etc). Some of these will work, others will be superceded by spontaneous invention. It's a great collective experiment.


To go where David Talbot fears to tread! Do these people even realize what complete self-parodies they are? Probably not: as Tammy Bruce says in another comment: "I've found too much navel-gazing can be hazardous." On the other hand, the confluence of so many "contrarian" blowhards on a single website has given me new respect for the beleaguered "MSM" and its brand of cautious, sometimes frivolous and frivolously investigated centrism. Before you slam the old guard, think about what the new one threatens to look like.