Michael Kinsley should be put out of our misery
Posted on November 28th, 2006 by Jackie Danicki
Not a day goes by when I don’t read a column or opinion piece in the ‘mainstream’ press and think, “Yeesh, I read better blog posts than this many times a day.” This piece about how people online have egos (try to stop your eyes from rolling back in your head as you read it), by the Guardian’s American Editor, Michael Kinsley, is one such example. It’s so bad that I cannot even be bothered to detail exactly why and how it is bad. He’s either phoning it in or can’t do any better; either way, how does he stay in work? I have a feeling his very web-savvy colleagues at the Guardian - many of whom (gasp!) have their own blogs - will be fairly embarrassed at being associated with this drivel.
We’ve become far more critical of the MSM writing since blogging really took off in the summer. It’s true that some of the best writing is on the web now. By the way, you’re in mt Blogfocus this evening at 21:00.
This is (yet another) example of the MSM arguing for its own extinction. Kinsley’s sampling of what’s online is atrocious; it’s as if he walked into the Library of Congress and concluded there is nothing there worth reading because, at a cursory glance, he spotted an Us Weekly.
As for phoning it in, I find it both astounding and insulting that he and his editors let the following through:
People wish things on your mother, simply for bearing you, that you wouldn’t wish on Hitler.
There is a certain kind of Ivy League smugness that is rather endemic in parts of the American press, and Kinsley is just about the worst proponent of it that I know of. (I get the impression that the old boys club of its chief proponents is one of the more incestuous ones around, too). I think that smugness is the worst quality of the Kinsley created Slate, too - which is a shame, because it often contains some otherwise pretty decent journalism.