"WHAT'S MISSING FROM NEWS IS THE NEWS"

Outstanding piece by Frank Rich today in the NYTimes.

TWO weeks ago Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide. Next week Dan Rather commits ritual suicide, leaving the anchor chair at CBS prematurely as penance for his toxic National Guard story. The two journalists shared little but an abiding distaste - make that hatred in Thompson's case - for the Great Satan of 20th-century American politics, Richard Nixon. The best work of both was long behind them. Yet memories of that best work - not to mention the coincidental timing of their departures - only accentuate the vacuum in that cultural category we stubbornly insist on calling News.

What's missing from News is the news.

Rich makes one glaring error when he writes, "bloggers were on the campaign payrolls of both a Republican office-seeker (South Dakota's Senator John Thune) and a Democrat (Howard Dean) during last year's campaign" without explaining how very different were the two cases. Markos Moulitsas (of Daily KOS fame) and Jerome (MyDD) Armstrong did work for a time as consultants for the Dean campaign, which Kos clearly disclosed on his web site; as for Jerome, he completely shut down his blog during that time period. In contrast, the Thune bloggers never disclosed their association with the campaign and represented themselves as independent.