Day: February 19, 2006

I like Bill Safire, mostly, but this cutesy article on blog jargon reads a little like an old man talking to his friends at the barbershop about those wacky kids and their newfangled time machine gadget thingys.

While I’m sure this is all tongue-in-cheek, Bill is getting up there in age, so it’s rather believable that he’d consider the blog phenomenon to be more like Alice in Wonderland’s Tea Party than the beginnings of a new instamedia. He doesn’t come right out and say he lacks an understanding of our blogosphere, but he really doesn’t need to. It’s simply ‘Blargon’ to Bill.

When will they learn?

MAIN PRESS PLANS ANOTHER WEEK OF CHENEY SHOOTING COVERAGE

If the nation’s top magazines have the pulse of the country — get ready for another exhaustive week of exhaustive Cheney shooting coverage!

This just in… Both TIME and NEWSWEEK are planning high impact covers of Cheney for newsstands starting tomorrow, with each magazine rolling out top staff bylines and thousands of words on the hunting incident: TIME: With deep reporting by John Cloud, Mike Allen and Matthew Cooper/ Washington, Cathy Booth Thomas and Patricia Kilday Hart/ Austin, and Hilary Hylton. NEWSWEEK urgently brings in its big investigative guns: Evan Thomas, Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey, Mark Hosenball and Eleanor Clift in Washington and Carol Rust in Texas.

NEWSWEEK’s Jonathan Alter essays that media budget cuts and shifting news priorities have contributed to the public being in the dark about Cheney’s ways and means.

TIME headlines a poll: DICK CHENEY APPROVAL RATING 29%

NEWSWEEK editor Mark Whitaker defends his decision to push for another week of Cheney-Shooting coverage: “The reason we ultimately decided to stick with a cover is not because of the hunting incident itself-although we did turn up some new details that you might not have read elsewhere-but because of what it says about the mysterious world of the most powerful vice president of recent times.”

…Or what it says about the timing and state of print publications in the Click Age of news cycles.

Alter’s comment is telling of just how out of touch the elite media has become.

Of course, keeping the story alive just means that bloggers will have another productive week with lots of opportunities to ridicule and denigrate the MSM. Bring it on.