David Janes defends bloggers:
One of the things I enjoyed about the blogosphere [is the] commitment [of] most of the bloggers I read to “anti-idiotarianism”, a commitment to truth even if it doesn’t promote their narrow political prejudices. Many of the top-tier warbloggers were Democrats, not out-of-the-closet unreformed Neanderthals. Check it out, if you need to. And it’s just not a case of “conservatives are liberals who have been mugged”: there’s a great diversity of opinion, civil debate and politic belief within the blogosphere, because there’s a basic commitment to the non-distortion of reality and the truth.
We’ll never have a “vibrant new global thinking process” if one’s concept of debate is to declare “blue is red” just because some guy you hate mentioned the colour of the sky the other day.
I’m not entirely convinced that bloggers are necessarily more honest or “committed to the truth” than mainstream journalists, professional writers, politicians, or the average guy on the street. Blogging is a tool. Like any other tool, it can be used to educate, provoke, spew nonsense, or (in my case) spout off.
In its infancy, blogging was perhaps “purer”, in the sense that most blogs were individuals writing on their own time and budget, as opposed to some of the big blogs we see now that have emerged into moneymaking careers. (Note to readers: that’s obviously not the case here.) In addition, bloggers are generally not journalists with professional training and a research staff. It’s extraordinarily easy for just about anyone to set up a blog, and they can just as readily be used to spread lies, propaganda, and disinformation. If a sort of “anti-idiotarian” courtesy emerged in the blogosphere, it is only because people decided that they want to be good neighbours and play by the rules. But blogging is just as open to abuse as any other medium, and perhaps more so. And with the emerging of a few major blogs that dictate the sphere, it seems that the rest of us mortals have been reduced to begging for scraps… or the ever-coveted link from Instapundit to generate Instatraffic.
That said, I think it’s illogical to lament the fact that someone is blogging a different point of view from yours. With so much going on out there, the only way to really figure anything out and have opinions is to read a wide variety of opinions, often dissenting ones. And blogs have made that much easier.