But what can one say about the main stream media? When there is something of import with a need for deep analysis or accurate exposition the MSM is MIA. For proof I need only mention the Danish Cartoon Affair. 99.9999% of Americans who relied solely on television broadcast or the print media had no clue what the fuss was all about.

Although newspapers do print letters to the editor, feedback on stories are too slow to be of any real value. On blogs I can leave a comment 10 seconds after a story breaks and have Joe USA tell me I'm wrong by typing a link showing me where I erred.

Leah McLaren thinks that the story is the story. It is not. The real story is the ping-ponging of thousands of readers' responses to the story. What Joe USA and even what Helmut Europe thinks of the story.

I am certain of one thing: blog readers know more about an issue than the poor shlub who only reads newspapers - if there is such a person.

And before anyone praises the "media professionals" too highly the only person on tv or radio that I ever heard pronounce the word flaccid correctly is Ron Kuby on the Sliwa and Kuby show.

As for accuracy, it was bloggers who corrected Dan Rather. And it is bloggers ¹ who dumped on Leah McLaren's writing.

So Leah, may I call you Leah?, the notion that the blogosphere has nothing to offer you is untrue. It is only the blogosphere that has anything of value to offer. The main stream media is so big, so afraid of offending, so removed from the regular guy that it is bland and uninforming. Come back to the blogosphere. Without bloggers' voices you'll be all alone.

Related blogs/websites:

bad example - SEVENTH OCCASIONAL JERKY AWARDS , Excerpt: Information found on blogs is at least as accurate as information found in the mainstream media.

Leah's website for promoting her book The Continuity Girl.

Leah McLaren was born in Peterborough, Ont., in 1975. As a teen she attended Claude Watson School for the Arts in Toronto, followed by stints studying English literature at McGill and Trent University, where she received a bachelor's degree in 1998.

At eighteen she interned at and wrote a feature for the daily newspaper the Globe and Mail where she now writes her regular Saturday column. Since then she has contributed to a variety of publications including the McGill Daily, Toronto Life, ROB, Flare, Fashion and EnRoute.

Notes

(1):

No, No, No Leah!, Wednesday, April 21, 2004

The second point my friend made was that in fact, Leah McLaren is an intelligent person who is AWARE of the shallow tone of her writing; she is purposefully playing the role of the dumb blonde. Indeed it is a bit of “old school” criticism to conflate the author and her work (that’s a term they teach you in grad school, by the way—“old school”), but in the case of a newspaper columnist, perhaps it is an easy mistake to make—she is, after all, supposed to be writing about herself, herself being a representation of a certain demographic. The demographic is that of highly educated single twenty-somethings with well-paying jobs, who still party like they are undergrads, but also have mortgages and cleaning ladies. They are the new teenager: a little more responsibility, but still lots of disposable income. This is certainly a cultural phenomenon worth reporting on, even worth having a regular columnist for—this is the IT I was looking for.

I King, Leah McLaren is still still full of shit but apparently I'm also in love with her. Or myself

A second installment in an ongoing series which harrowingly suggests that the Weekend edition of the Globe & Mail, specifically the seventy-two square inches devoted to a pneumatic navel-gazing bitchy blonde columnist, is the crux of my entire life. So, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I saw Leah McLaren hoovering up duMauriers in a bar only to find her column the next morning to be about how she'd quit smoking. The nerve, the nerve etc. etc. So later that week I told Frank magazine. Apparently they weren't interested because there was nothing about it in the current issue. The Frank magazine snub was still on my mind, I guess, as I fell asleep last night because I had a dream about getting a job at the Globe & Mail (the offices of which took the form of a trying-too-hard middle-to-upper scale Italian restaurant where everybody was falldown drunk), only to find Leah McLaren hanging off my arm, unwilling to let go. Everywhere we went she kept running into people she knew (notably a woman named "Collie" and a woman named "Sully") and they were all visibly and audibly disgusted with her. She didn't seem to notice and kept chirruping and grinning at them. Despite all these people, including myself initially, looking at her as though she were a turd hovering under their noses, she was always warm and affectionate. It was really sad. Then I woke up.