the Parker Pot calling the Harker Kettle black

Hey Folks,

Ms. Kathlene Parker is at it again, naively letting her bourgeoisie prejudices show again. Here are some excerpts from a recent column followed by my view:




Beware the host of babbling bloggers
Thursday, December 29, 2005

KATHLEEN PARKER

Of all the stories leading America’s annual greatest-hits list, the one that subsumes the rest is the evolution of information in the Age of Blogging.

. . .

There’s something frankly creepy about the explosion we now call the blogosphere – the "electroniverse" where recently wired squatters set up new camps each day. As I write, the number of blogs (Web logs) and bloggers (those who blog) is estimated in the tens of millions worldwide.

Although I’ve been a blog fan since the beginning, and have written favorably about the value added to journalism and public knowledge thanks to the new "citizen journalist," I’m also wary of power untempered by restraint and accountability.

. . .

Bloggers persist no matter their contributions or quality, though most would have little to occupy their time were the mainstream media to disappear tomorrow. Some bloggers do their own reporting, but most rely on mainstream reporters to do the heavy lifting. Some bloggers also offer superb commentary, but most buzz and blurt like caffeinated adolescents.

Even so, they hold the same megaphone as the adults and enjoy perceived credibility owing to membership in the larger world of blog grown-ups. These effete and often clever baby "bloggies" are rich in time and toys, but bereft of adult supervision.

Spoiled and undisciplined, they have seized the stage, a privilege granted not by years in the trenches, but by virtue of a three-pronged plug and the miracle of WiFi. They play tag team with hyperlinks ("I’ll say you’re important if you’ll say I’m important") and shriek "Gotcha!" when they catch some weary wage earner in a mistake or oversight. Plenty smart but lacking in wisdom, they possess the power of a forum, but neither the maturity nor humility that years of experience impose.

Each time I wander into blogdom, I’m reminded of the savage children stranded on an island in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Without adult supervision, they organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians in the absence of a civilizing structure.

What Golding demonstrated and what we’re witnessing as the blogosphere’s offspring multiply is that people tend to abuse power when it is unearned and will bring down others to enhance themselves. Likewise, many bloggers seek the destruction of others for their own self-aggrandizement. When a mainstream journalist stumbles, they pile on like so many savages, hoisting his or her head on a bloody stick as Golding’s children did the fly-covered head of a butchered sow.

. . .

We can’t silence them, but for civilization’s sake and the integrity of information by which we all live or die, we can and should ignore them.

Kathleen Parker writes for The Orlando (Fla.) Sentinel.
kparker@kparker.com


Folks,

It seems to me that one reason blogging HAS exploded is because so many people’s views HAVE BEEN ignored by “mainstream” journalists who ARE “tempered by restraint and accountability” from addressing the bloggers’ concerns. Parker’s suggestion to ignore the bloggers just adds fuel to the fire.

The “mainstream” press IS tempered, restrained, and held accountable but by POWERFUL people and by economic considerations – which also are the province of wealthy, powerful people. Regular folks be damned.

I’ve seen it happen first hand in my small town of Circleville and in Columbus at the statehouse. The “New York Times” slogan “All the news that’s fit to print” gives a clue. SOMEBODY is determining what’s fit to print, and you can bet that the “somebody” answers to the powerful, not to regular folks.

Hence, what ISN’T fit to print (according to the wealthy lords of politics and commerce) appears on blogs or alternative radio (where it exists), or disappears.

Now, bloggers have and do put out trash, but so do the White House and the “mainstream” media Parker praises as being “adult.” Perhaps Parker is worried that if the public becomes discerning enough to separate the gold from the garbage within blogs, they might be able to do the same thing with the “mainstream” press instead of blindly swallowing everything shoveled its way.

As for the analogy to Golding’s novel, it has been many years since I read it, but my memory suggests that she overlooked a major point the author made.

It might seem that by using children to act out the plot, Golding suggests naive children, “in the absence of a civilizing structure,” and without “adult supervision,” might “organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians.”

Actually, the story's surviving children are rescued in the end by adult sailors from a ship of war actively engaged in a war that itself caused the children to be evacuated and eventually trapped on the island in the first place. These mature, “civilized,” humble, disciplined, experienced adults who are supposedly tempered by restraint and accountability are engaged in the same sort of savage, mindless behavior from which they have just rescued the children.

Golding’s point is: Who will rescue the adults? And I doubt that he would discount the tragedy of these adults’ misuse of power on the basis that “they had earned it” through experience, maturity, discipline, restraint, or by having been supervised by adults.

Parker would save us from the bloggers, but - as Golding would ask - who will save us from Parker and the mainstream press?

- Uke Man