More on the MSNBC/FOX "News" False Equivalence

One measure of a blog's success is how many "hits" you get, and another is how many comments your posts generate. By either measure, I'm not just small potatoes, I'm ground up, dehydrated potato powder.  In fact, I think if I ever crossed the threshold from hobbyist blogger to overnight success, I'd probably get stage fright.  But I've always wanted at least a little more readership, and especially comments. Or I thought I did.

Lately, I've been getting more comments than usual, though they're for sure a "core group" of four or five people, with a few other anonymous posters thrown in.  In that mix are people who like what I have to say and some who disagree but are quite civil, even friendly.  But it can't all be like that, not in on a quasi-political blog. There are also--in addition to spammers who manage to get through Google's meager security--commenters who argue vociferously, and not in a poke-poke, nudge-nudge kind of way.  So, I poke back, not always artfully, and the point almost always wanders away from whatever I wrote about in the first place.  It's an odd, unusual, sometimes baffling experience.

But what happens when you are a successful blogger, and your antagonist is also a successful blogger? Well then it comes out of the small-fry, below-the-fold comments, and becomes a live-action volley from blog to blog.  In the case below, a Huffington Post blogger wrote a piece about MSNBC and Keith Olbermann. Then a NewsBusters blogger picked a quote out of the HP piece and magnified it, saying AHA! A liberal admits that MSNBC is a political outfit!  Or similar, you get the idea. 

From where I sit, the two "newsish" channels can simplistically be called flip sides of the same coin. But with even a small bit of objectivity, differences can be plainly seen in both tone and style.  I would never say that MSNBC doesn't skew liberal (in prime time, at least), though many "FOX Fans" will say that FOX "News" doesn't skew conservative. In fact my chief antagonist in my comments thinks FOX is left-of-center.  I know, right?  So, it is a hard subject to argue, as was proven by Thursday's Jon Stewart interview on The Rachel Maddow Show. But more on that later.

That was a long way to go to say that it is interesting for me to see an issue I've debated on my own site blown up onto a much larger screen. And I'm sure that if one of my back-and-forths had as wide an audience as NewsBusters or Huffington Post, I'd hyperventilate and then go all fetal.

[Excerpt]

A Fox on Both Your Houses?



So this is kind of entertaining.


Last night I got an e-mail that was cc'd to about 50 or so indiscriminate addresses; it seemed to be trying to find its way into the hands of, among others, Glenn Beck, Rachel Maddow, Matt Drudge, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, O'Reilly's little Renfield-like producer Jesse Watters, Dana Milbank at the Post, and, yes, Keith Olbermann. What it contained was a link to a blog post currently running over at Newsbusters. . .

Read more at: Huffington Post