[Media]

Blogo-carpetbagging.

There are many people who have the credibility to say this: "Media life seems to have turned into one long cannibal feast, a fratricidal Thanksgiving dinner minus the giving of thanks." Tina Brown is not among them. She has made a career of cannibalizing her profession, so I find her current critique of big media--in that outpost of counter-media, the Washington Post--a little more than disengenous. Early in the screed, she lets fly with this insult:

Mainstream Media are trapped in the pincer assaults of the fact-free ethical anarchy of the blogosphere and the cynicism of quarterly profit-driven conglomerates enslaved to entertainment values.

Oh, come off it. Were it not for big media's willingness to embrace blogging's punky outsider voice, she would never have had the chance to write this kind of piece. Were it not for her status as a major player in the mainstream press for decades, she would not have been tapped to write it. In fact, if it weren't for blogs, who knows if it would even have occurred to her to write it. She's trying to carpetbag on the blogging phenomenon without looking like a carpetbagger.