Interesting article about bloggers as monitorial citizens. Especially amusing was this part:

"The evident preference of the great mass of the public for soft news, infotainment, and a brand of journalism that many "political intellectuals" clearly see as crass and shallow, presents seemingly insuperable barriers to achieving any meaningful form of broad-based civic discourse leading to a truly informed citizenry. Yet the conviction that journalism (including self-publishing phenomena like blogging) should embody more lofty aspirations and tackle 'worthy' subjects is not confined to intellectuals of a broadly left-leaning orientation (like Tim Dunlop or Eva Cox). Right-leaning economist Gerard Jackson's Brookes News recently launched a remarkably vitriolic attack on Australia's leading (in terms of audience size) blogger Tim Blair. The author, Joe Cambria, seems to regard Blair as letting down the right-wing cause by exhibiting insufficient intellectualism:

"Blair's articles and blog are, to be charitable, rather long on smart aleck commentary and extremely short on analysis. Furthermore, they suggest, rightly or wrongly, that he is not what one might call bookish. Now how can anyone successfully tackle the left without a reasonable knowledge of economic theory, the history of economic thought, economic history and of leftist thought? Yet Blair gives no indication of being even slightly acquainted with these subjects. Nevertheless, despite his obvious shortcomings and shallow commentary, Melbourne's Adam Smith Club, the H. R. Nicholls Society, the Devines and now the publicly funded magazine Quadrant appear to be presenting Mr Blair as something he self-evidently is not - and that is a rightwing intellectual."

That attitude ignores, or at least treats as irrelevant, the fact that Blair reputedly often attracts a daily audience to his blog numbering in the tens of thousands, where more academically-inclined bloggers, such as University of Queensland economist John Quiggin or University of Sydney law academic Kim Weatherall, typically enjoy daily 'hit' counts in the hundreds."

Tim Blair's blog can be found here.

via philosophy.com