The Blogosphere: Keeping the Waters Pure

It can evoke thoughts of a rat (or John Belushi!) at a fancy party to observe the fear and loathing a little blogging can produce in the staid mutually backscratching establishment these days. I'm probably more in the shrew (flea?) category myself, but even a little reflected glow at all the frantic scurrying is satisfying.

SusanG at DailyKos has this rundown. Even her title has a bit of a chortle in it, I think:

Bloggers at Last Unite Tony Snow and WH Press Corps

Tony Snow and "real journalists" finally agreed on something tonight at a roundtable held for very serious people at the National Press Club: Blogs suck. They’re mean. And ... and ... and ... they actually expect reporters to do their jobs!

We’ll skip Tony Snow. Who cares? But via Think Progress, a couple of journalists had some interesting things to say, kind of opening a door into the higher minds that are raised so far above the rest of us.

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Newsweek’s White House correspondent Richard Wolffe added, "[Bloggers] want us to play a role that isn’t really our role. Our role is to ask questions and get information. ... It’s not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they throw their hands up and surrender."

That’s it? Ask questions and get information? No context, no analysis, no pointing out that what Tony Snow says this morning was contradicted by what he said last week? Gotcha. I guess that relegates any role beyond being a human tape recorder to the blogs.

By the way, Mr. Wolffe? Thomas Jefferson had a few thoughts on the American people forming opinions and what that meant for the government:

"The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." -- Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823.

I kinda like that as a blogging motto: Keeping the waters pure. But I sure can see how that threatens people sitting around at a National Press Club roundtable talking about very important things like how we are ruining political discourse in this country by letting just any old Joe (or Josephine) have a voice.