I always love it when Emily Rooney, on WGBH’s “Beat the Press,” contemplates the demise of print journalism. She gets an expression on her face that the French call a “moue,” sort of halfway between a pout and a frown. Chair-mate Joe Sciacca at this point looks uncomfortable, too, like he’s ready to run for Emily’s fainting couch.
Alex Beam same thing. Beam proudly invented snark decades ago, around the same time that Al Gore invented the Internet. And no $#%@%E%^%$# bloggers are going to deny him his glory. So he asks the hard-hitting Globe questions about these upstarts:
Who has helped send three successive speakers of the Massachusetts House to the penalty box? We have. Who learned about the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping of American citizens? A reporter for The New York Times. Who chased down blubbering cricketeer-Ponzi swindler Allen Stanford? A reporter for ABC News, another beleaguered member of the mainstream media. Who broke the news about John Edwards’s adultery and the ensuing mountain of backstopping lies? Not the triumphalist, self-aggrandizing political bloggers.
We might ask other questions as well. Who ran story after story in 2007 and 2008 quoting the Massachusetts real estate industry that housing prices were recovering nicely? Who didn’t write about then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s adulterous affair while Gingrich was leading the charge to impeach President Bill Clinton for an adulterous relationship? And, of course, who passively and actively enabled the Bush administration, with its manipulation, lies, and threats, to carry out a disastrous war in Iraq? Those “triumphalist, self-aggrandizing political bloggers?” Nope.
Patience, Alex, that early retirement letter will come. It really will.
He’s different.
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p>But how, exactly, was a blogger supposed to break the John Edwards story?