Saturday in Northbrook, Illinois, about 300 people gathered to attend an awards ceremony presented by the Sam Adams Alliance.
One of the presenters was Michelle Malkin, who has been at the forefront of blogging for a long time. She’s also been involved in the recent tea party movement.
In her remarks (introducing my friend Chad Everson as winner of the best state blogger award), she talked about the differences between traditional news media and blogging.
“I have watched as the dinosaur media strains and groans in the face of competition from citizen journalists and citizen bloggers,” she said.
Often these citizens have outworked the legacy media. The professional media hasn’t welcomed citizen journalists– in fact they’ve been bitter.
She mentioned Jonathan Klein, former executive vice president of CBS News, who said “You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances [at 60 Minutes] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.” This was at the time that Dan Rather of CBS was promoting a fraudulent story that was uncovered by bloggers.
She mentioned Steve Lovelady, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, who described bloggers as “salivating morons who make up the lynch mob.”
Malkin said that bloggers are often described as snarky and profane. “Anyone who has tuned into CNN and MSNBC over the last week and heard untold vulgar sexual innuendos about teabagging can tell you who has been the salivating lynch mob, and who has been vulgar and profane.”
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