Peggy Noonan on the Blogosphere

Peggy Noonan of the OpinionJournal has a piece today on the Blogosphere:

The Blogs Must Be Crazy

Or maybe the MSM is just suffering from freedom envy.

Thursday, February 17, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

"Salivating morons." "Scalp hunters." "Moon howlers." "Trophy hunters." "Sons of Sen. McCarthy." "Rabid." "Blogswarm." "These pseudo-journalist lynch mob people."

This is excellent invective. It must come from bloggers. But wait, it was the mainstream media and their maidservants in the elite journalism reviews, and they were talking about bloggers!

Those MSMers have gone wild, I tell you! The tendentious language, the low insults. It's the Wild Wild West out there. We may have to consider legislation.

When you hear name-calling like what we've been hearing from the elite media this week, you know someone must be doing something right. The hysterical edge makes you wonder if writers for newspapers and magazines and professors in J-schools don't have a serious case of freedom envy.

The bloggers have that freedom. They have the still pent-up energy of a liberated citizenry, too. The MSM doesn't. It has lost its old monopoly on information. It is angry.

Read the rest here.

Meanwhile Captain Ed over at Captain's Quarter's is not too happy with this appeasement piece by the Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal:

Unfortunately for the WSJ editorial board, what they fail to recognize is that bloggers aren't some third-party creation from ether. Bloggers are media consumers, and in fact should be their target demographic. We're involved, we read voraciously, and we want to interact with the world. Especially for a publication like the Wall Street Journal, which doesn't deliver to the doorstep as a monopoly in a one-paper town, that should be a group to encourage, not one at which to toss dismissive insults. I cannot think of another corporation who thought that implying their customers were too immature to decide for themselves what they need constituted a successful marketing strategy -- except for the federal government and their entitlement programs. Adopting that marketing plan for the bastion of American capitalism seems more than just passingly strange to me.

Hopefully, Noonan's piece intends on smoothing over relations with the bloggers who not only read WSJ/OJ's offerings on a regular basis but normally (speaking for myself) enthusiastically recommend them to their readers. I'd like to feel good about my daily visits to OJ again.

Note: See also Hugh Hewitt's new column in the Weekly Standard on the WSJ/blogosphere debate.

Point well written, Captain Ed.

So, what say you Wall Street Journal?