Send in the Clowns
By John Amato Sunday Aug 19, 2007 12:45pmMaybe Michael Skube should read a few blogs before he...oh, nevermind...
Now doesn't this put a smile on your face? Actually it's quite sad...
John Amato’s virtual online magazine…OK, It’s a blog!
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciG-Xs7mBwU
Dang those big bad scary bloggers (even if they are just teenage girls!)
Against All Enemies!
Journalism professor, eh? Good grief.
I'm fascinated at reading of a "journalist" who writes to criticize bloggers, and proceeds to commit the unprofessional sins that he accuses bloggers of. Amazing.
Mr Skube, boy are you missing out. Get out there and see some of the incredible work that bloggers are doing.
Also I agree with a commenter on the other site.
I just don't have the time to read long, un-researched journalist articles.
Ha!
I think it needs more time, but it's getting there. But one thing is for certain it gives the mass a voice.
Hey, a Journalist giving his opinion about a blog where he condemns the blogs for giving their opinions!
Did this guy learn about hypocrisy at his journalism school? Because I learned about it at IT school.
*yawn*
another columinst/journalist that feels threatened by blogs. it is starting to become cliche that another pundit, columnist, journalist attacks the open forums. and my thought: phhhpt...
well, skube, wring your hands some more, this is democracy. the punditocracy HATES it that the "little people" are actually choosing to read blogs over getting their "news" from the MSM (call it whatever, we all know what it is).
and, god forbid, we are actually formulating our own *gasp* opinions. truly dangerous stuff--
hey, skube, boo!!
I give the Professor an "F".
Send in the Clowns
An entire thread for the Republican debates?
PNAAC Minister @ 2:
Trying to set this "professor" up to be busted by Perverted Justice and NBC?
"Perhaps I'm naive. But it surprises me a great deal that a professor of journalism freely admits that he allows to appear under his own name claims about a publication he concedes he's never read."
Replace "professor of journalism" with congressman, president, msm reporter or any other seat of responsibility these days!
Obama 2008!!!!!!
Who wants to bet that he watches O'Reilly every evening?
Michael Skube is just another pukka sahib looking down his nose at the Great Unwashed. He is hardly original (I'd be willing to bet money he got the Samuel Johnson quote from Anne Applebaum), and he certainly won't be the last. What he fails to understand is that the blogosphere, for all its faults, is critically important in a society where so-called the "real" journalists are doing shoddy work and are bought and sold like politicians. Given the media circus that's been ongoing in this country for a long time, much longer than Bush has been in office, you'd think that a little humility would be in order, but apparently not. Mr. Skube should take the log out of his own eye before he sets about taking the speck out of the eye of the blogosphere.
Isn't the LA Times owned by Tribune Media? The same corporate whores who own the Chicago Tribune. That would explain a lot.
This guy makes professors look so much more credible....
Geesh....
And Michael head-in-the-sand Skube continued on his merry, clueless way until one day, his entire profession went the way of the dodo bird.
I wonder how the administration at Elon University feels about having such a lazy-assed poseur teaching "journalism" to their students?
He sounds more suited to a tenured position at Praise The Lord U, or whatever it is they call jerry falewell's day care facility for rightist-xian-spawn.
I wonder if he's ever heard of Habermas' concept of a public sphere and tried to apply it to blogging. Even at such a rudimentary level it makes some sense.
What passes for a doctorate these days?
Wow.
Just wow.
How embarrassing for the good perfesser.
I think some people feel their profession is being threatened by the popularity of blogs so they attack rather than find out what blogs are all about. They don't want to admit they are behind the times and scared as hell of the times ahead.
On a kind of funny note, the word "blog" is not recognized by Spell Check, even though the Spell Check is on a blog.
[Deleted. Save it for an appropriate thread]
In Michael Skube's defense:
He works for a for profit company and given the competitive nature of business, it is probably in his job description to attack competing publications. As a daily form of published text, Blogs are part of the competition. Blogs are in direct competition with newspapers to get readers, I myself have canceled my subscription to the Chicago Tribune, and blogs were one of several factors that made me take that decision. It would be in his financial interest to attack Blogs, based on competing for readership alone (much like the Chicago Sun Times competes with the Chicago Tribune for readers.)
Blogs also take away advertisement space from traditional media. Of course it is small now, but with time it would be easy to believe advertisers will pay more and more for advertisement space at blogs given the likelihood Blogs will continue to increase in popularity, and the likelihood Blogs are becoming increasingly acceptable as mainstream. This would take money from traditional outlets like newspapers.
So what we have is a two pronged threat: Blogs take readers away from newspapers, and they take advertisers away from newspapers. Skube does work at a newspaper, so it's in his best interest to keep attacking threats to his way of life.
This is the only defense I can think of for Skube, since his writing style sucks and I can't begin to form a defense for that.
I got the impression the professor was thinking of more than just the political and mainstream commercial blogs, which some seem to think is all that is meant by the word "blog".
ask the geico caveman would say.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG1ObrqpPao
[Deleted. Off topic]
His bio is written at about a jr. high grade level, maybe lower:
http://facstaff.elon.edu/gibson/jcm327/assignments/web_samples/skube/pag...
Anybody who quotes Christopher Lasch approvingly is an idiot. No one who wirtes like this is worth paying any attention to:
Liberal ideology not only gives little support to the family, it cannot even make sense of the family, an institution that appears irrational in the sense that its members ideally do not think of their own interests and of the rights designed to protect them, and in the further sense that they promise to sustain each other through a lifetime. What folly!
http://thor.clark.edu/sengland/previous%20features/a_dialogue_with_chris...
Send in even this clown?
http://www.geocities.com/hollywood/cinema/2636/pic-coll1/it-clown.jpg
George @ 29:
Is he talking about Catholics or Methodists?
Anyone know the expected gestation period for Jenna's new baby?
These journalists know their profession is dead. People are putting down the papers and mags and subscribing to rss feeds
The profession isn't dead, just the medium has changed. They no longer have a monopoly on it. Now they have to sustain themselves based on the merits of their work, not that they had the only paper in town.
Of course, there is an alternative explanation:
Perhaps the "editor" was a former student of Skube's and was given a bad grade once upon a time. If the editor was seeking to make the professor look bad, inserting the name a blog that has developed a rep for original reporting as an example of blogs that don't would be a damn good way to accomplish it.
Skube Doo...
so the R-wing BS machine is now giving us war on blogs and war against Iran.
why am I not surprised?
Seele^ @ 24:
Why defend him at all?
The last paragraph is priceless:
The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.
So... if the story is that Cheney wants to attack Iran - VERY IMPORTANT STORY - Skube feels that our opinions mean nothing?
If Bush decides that Chocolate is his favorite flavor of ice cream... hey, Blog away!
This guy is on a very high horse. He needs to dismount.
Everyone sing along:
Skube-doobie-doo
Where are you?
We have some facts to check now!
Skube-doobie-doo
We love you -
You proved that blogs can work now.
And if you're ever in a place
and you're feeling cramped by those facts
Don't look back
Because if you're a careless blogger you could be hit
by some Skube smacks!
Don't hold back!
Skube-doobie-doo
Where are you?
We have some facts to check now...
Scott1960 @ 35:
And Scrappy Doo too.
Hey that could be shrubya's new nick-name.
Skube says, "A reporter, if he's worthy of being called one, respects the craft's cardinal rules: accuracy, impartiality, fairness, verification, proper attribution."
That single statement is so dishonest and so insulting that it borders on the laughable. Anyone that understands journalism at all, nay any rational human being knows that the journalism practiced by so-called modern day journalists is NOT journalism. These morons can't even use Google to fact check. Or they choose not to. It's not like they have to skulk around the streets, pick up a book or hound a source anymore. They can sit on their fat asses and do a simple search. But even that seems to be too much "hard work" for the lazy sacks of shit that call themselves "newsmen and newswomen".
Blogging may not be traditional journalism, but it certainly has far more integrity than what today is pawned off on the public AS journalism.
The vast majority of foreign al-Qaeda fighters in Iraq are Saudis. The only clear and unambiguous message we have sent to the Saudis is a 20 billion dollar arms sale.
How about we send in this clown to Iran?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyuA7zWiiM4
(H)e told me twice that his real point about blogs was: "Who has the time to read them?"
I find time to read Glenn Greenwald, Josh Marshall, Juan Cole and the assorted Kossacks. Big shout out to antiwar.com as well who are fundraising now. Michael Skube is the one I don't have time for.
OK i love blogs but...
The part of this whole thing I don't get is, in the interest of credibility, bloggers must cite references, yes? ...and usually these references are print publications...if blogs put them out of business (or are at least partially responsible), where will the references come from? therefore, don't blogs need print publications?
Anyone? Thoughts? Anyone?
Bueller?
Crumbelievable@45, a lot of bloggers get hard news from McClatchy, overseas papers, the BBC and places far away from the LATimes. Of course, if the US nationals died (they won't) we wouldn't have Skube (and Michael Gordon for another) to kick around anymore, but I wouldn't mourn their passing for very long.
Quite often I'll find an MSM blog critic with whom I agree, at least in part. But most have some things in common which are really unattractive and make them look weak and snively: they're teed off, they're nasty, they're clutching drying turf, they exaggerate, and by god they haven't spent much time reading good blogs. The Skube piece was almost unreadable for that reason. We need to remember: when people like Skube talk about "bloggers," he may not have much acquaintance with the best -- like C&L and maybe 10 or 20 others which are right up there in terms of hard news and interesting juxtapositions of news events. The latter is hard to find in MSM. Billmon, for example, was a pastmaster at snipping two or more distinct newsclippings, pasting them together, and illuminating yet another dark corner of our world. Try and find that in the LATimes.
PS. I think bloggers often get blamed for their commenters. Are we allowed to blame Skube for the LA Times' subscribers? Even the ones who rip off grannies, pee while swimming, drive Expeditions, and voted for Arnold?
I tend toward BBC myself.
Kind of like when Germans turned to find out how WWII was really going.
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