Coffee, cigarettes, and lefty blogs

It’s entirely accurate to say that, as my colleague and boss Ivan Osorio writes on our think tank blog, the Post’s recent article about left-wing bloggers is beyond parody. “The Left, Online and Outraged,” presents a spectacular comic portrait of a vitriolic liberal nutcase, complete with a photo that makes the subject, blogger Maryscott O’Connor, look like a paranoid wreck on the verge of a mental breakdown. And, without checking, I’m sure the article provided plenty of fodder for conservative bloggers. It plays up every stereotype of the looniest wings of the left, revealing unsavory tendencies at every turn. But this is exploitation passing as journalism, a cruel, sneering piece of surly sensationalism that explores the worst attitudes of the left and passes them off as representative.

Is there a trend on the left toward “loud, crass” blogging? Undoubtedly. Led by Daily Kos, a segment of the left has taken to venting online with unusual ferocity. But are the irate, hysterical writings of a few indicative of anything more than what we’ve always known, that there are extremists and demagogues on each side dismissing discourse and heading straight for the rhetorical sewers? It’s probably true, due to a variety of factors, that the left has a larger share of angry extremists (or at least more publicly visible). It’s also true that the net can encourage unhinged vitriol; just look at Ain’t It Cool talkbacks. The combination of anonymity, ease, and group pressure egging people on tends to explode on the web. And the Post's article is just gas on the flames.

For the Post to encourage this tendency toward over-the-top nastiness, to devote however many thousand words to it without a single mention of the many, many, many reasonable, articulate liberal writers and bloggers, only serves to push public perception of blogs and web politics to unpleasant extremes. If the Post published a piece like this about the fringes of conservatism, the right would be up in arms, and rightly so. The piece is simply brutal to O'Connor; it seems to delight in her every anxious tic, her wild, self-righteous fanatacism, her coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, cursing. She comes off as a neurotic monster with little in the way of sympathetic traits. The Post's article is a cruel freakshow--point and laugh, kids--and little more.