Rotophonic

Hating blogs has become a popular pastime of the mainstream press corp, politicians and others who would hope that their actions or inactions might slip on by unnoticed.

In their honor, I’d like to present the Blog Haters Hall of Fame.

MSNBC Fill-in Host, Mike Barnicle

If it’s one thing John McCain has going for him with average American, not the bloggers…these nitwits with their computers who blog all day long, is his character.”

I think it’s clearly self-evident that McCain’s character is clearly an issue with anyone who reads anything about the guy: e.g. backing the Keating Five and dumping his crippled wife. And anyone who uses the phrase “with their computers” is clearly a neophyte moron. [Watch the Video]

Windbag, Bill O’Reilly

Bloggers threatening — you know, what people don’t understand is that these Internet bloggers give messages to these candidates: “If you don’t do what we tell you to do, we will trash you and try to interfere with your fundraising.”
…
…I think it’s a danger to have blackmailers, which is what these bloggers are, active in the political process. [source: media matters]

Asshole, Robert Novak

As far as the community of Web commentators goes, Mr. Novak said he wasn’t impressed. “The bloggers bloviate. They give their opinions. They don’t try to find things out.”

[source: NY Sun]

Mort Kondrake, editor of Roll Call

Describing bloggers as “a pox,” Roll Call editor Mort Kondracke compared them to right-wing talk radio, charging that they are preventing “American problems” from being solved:

KONDRAKE: They are the leftward pressure on the Democratic Party that the right-wing talk show hosts are on the Republican party. And between the two of them they manage to polarize even further an already polarized politics, making it increasingly difficult to get any American problems solved, like health care, or the war in Iraq, or sensible terrorism policy. [source: ThinkProgress.org]

John Yoo, former lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel

[Since 9/11] we have had outpourings of new political speech through new methods and means, for example, uh, people I wish never existed — bloggers.

This did not exist before 9/11. Are we really in such a civil liberties crisis if bloggers are able to use this new media to say I think quite incredible things.
[source:Salon via Roger Ailes]

Joe Klein, Time Magazine writer

I am really getting sick and tired of people bashing the press all the time.

It used to be that people like me would get bashed from the right, and now there is the whole blogosphere bashing us as well.

Look, at this point, we’re pretty well battered. We’re losing advertising revenue.

And unless we can actually have the revenue to go out there and the credibility to report these issues, all of these right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, and the left-wing bloggers who are parasites on our reporting, are going to have nothing to do but sit home and twiddle their thumbs and opine about things they have no data for.
[source: Salon]

Jonathan Alter, Newsweek

There’s one dimension of the blogosphere that never ceases to amaze me: Some people disbelieve nearly everything they read in the “mainstream media” — and believe nearly everything they read online. Never mind that the ground-breaking reporting on which they base their opinions often comes from the MSM publications like Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.

That’s because until now, few online publications have invested enough money to undertake original reporting, which is much more expensive than mouthing off at home. I’m happy to see that the Huffington Post is moving to change that disparity by hiring top-flight and highly experienced reporters like Tom Edsall.
[source: Huffington Post]

Keith Waterhouse, Daily Mail

They are descended from a generation of titterers, pranksters and spokespersons of the bleeding obvious who in a more primitive era used to fool around with the office photocopier, circulating allegedly humorous material (“In these days of equal rights, why is Manchester not known as Personchester”) faxed or posted to them by fellow-nerds who in turn had painfully copied the stuff from a parish magazine.

The world is now their oyster – or their lobster as they would say, stealing the joke without acknowledgment.

They never acknowledge original authorship, believing as they do that googling has outmoded the law of copyright.

Googlers and bloggers do not have an original thought between them. Their ruminations on tax reform, Europe, immigration, Iraq, security, education and the rest have already been googled ten times over by fellow bloggers copying their source material from some other blogger’s googling diatribe to the local newspaper.

Hopefully, they will google themselves out of steam, replacing their hobby with games of draughts or snakes and ladders.
[source: Daily Mail]

David Bullard, Johanesberg Sunday Times

Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They’re cobbled together by people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else.
[source: Sunday Times]

Ted Rall, editorial cartoonist

Bloggers are ordinary people, many of them uneducated and with nothing interesting to say. They’re sitting in their rec rooms, regurgitating and spinning what real journalists have dug up through hard work. They don’t have sources, they don’t report, and no one holds them accountable when they make mistakes or flat out lie. [source: uExpress.com]