These are people who have focused their lives on creating relatively well-constructed weekly columns, who feel totally undermined by clever posts that pop up instantly.

Like this one.

Are we really supposed to believe that Josh Marshall, Eric Alterman, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma -- or Kevin Drum, for that matter -- are less well educated, less cultured, less well read, less critically minded, than newspaper journalists?

I've actually read Saint-Beuve -- and by the way, only a horse's ass quotes his name like this reviewer did -- and he has about as much in common with mass market newspaper critics as George Bush does with Ghandi.

Gene: The Saint-Beuve line cracked me up. I mean, was Schickel trying to seem like a pretentious twit?

Richard Schickel puts me in mind of one of my favorite quotes from the Iris playwright Brendan Behan:

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

It's fear and jealousy. He is a buggy whip maker comlaining about the noise and lack of poetry inherent in these newfangled auto-mobiles. His rice bowl is cracking. He is lashing out at the ominous threat. I personally find very few critics in any medium, that actually raise one's consciousness in appreciation of the work. Mostly they are looking for ways to entertain and engage, not enlighten.

When you consider that Schickel is trying to attract and keep an audience in an "established publication" that he had to work to attain through the "paying dues" system in order to reach a position of recognition and 'authority'; and then to have the great unwashed become another voice, easily accessible, and seen as a serious alternative - more and less (depending on whose mouth it is) - competing even for the same attention...

Threatened? well maybe, although I've seen enough commentary from people like Schickel to suggest it's a combination that includes elitism, intransigence to change, fear, anger, cluelessness and a tendency to circle the wagons when they feel challenged.

What adds to the humor of this is that I don't know many people who regard Schickel as an A-list critic. He's only a notch above Joel Siegel, who is only a notch above Joe Blow blogger.

I remember Richard Schickel writing for Life magazine back in the 1960s! I remember

Don't these people ever retire give someone else a chance?

Kevin-

What scares the MSM and those who depend on it for a living is that they are no longer the only game in town.

As a student of history, the Net and blogs remind me of a former period in our history where every crossroads and one horse town had a "newspaper". Often two. These papers were one man shops and usually borrowed from each other or from out of town papers for content. They were very personal in their character and politics, reflecting the views of their publisher/editor/reporter/writer/printer/accountant/janitor.

And were *vital* for the spread of our founding ideals. They also acted as sounding boards for new concepts, debates and political initiatives. Something that has been lacking in the established outlets.

So with comments like these and from others (Klein, Broder, etc....) we see the grousing of the buggy whip makers over the loss of influence and energy. The blogs have more growing clout than dozens of aging columnists in the political or arts fields. Their writers are often better suited for comment or at least as well as those columnist....with out the benefit decades of free lunches and information handouts.

I think the blog media came along at exactly the right time in the nation's history, when we needed them most. They played a part in the 2006 election and will do so even more in the 2008.

Thanks-
Ridge

His real problem? Schickel's real problem is that, thanks to the net, he now is subjected to the criticism of the unwashed masses, which he was never really subjected to before. It's pissing him off.

Evidently 'being right' doesn't count as "proof" for this esteemed critic. One wonders: what does?

It's not as if full time professional movie reviewers such as Schickel are doing such a bang-up job. The problem is that if you have to see hundreds of movies per year, most of them junk, it's very hard to do a good job writing about any one of them.

Memo to Richard Ford:

The judgment and filter that newspaper editors provide for Richard Ford is basically the judgment not to tell him that he writes like warmed over Barry Hannah, only not as funny. So, yeah, I guess he'd probably like that.

"They need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion"

prove to whom?

seems like schickel's problem is that he doesn't want to have to prove to us that his opinion is worth paying attention to.

Is that really so threatening?

Well Broder found it threatening enough to smear the lefty blogs as "those foul mouth" liberal bloggers (twice on Pumkin head's "Press the Meat").

We never heard so much Repug panic as when George Soros throw his money into into those netroot dot orgs. Hell, even the Republican controlled TNR has set about to find a few so-called centrist liberals to trash moveOn.org members, anything to divide the Dem Party by any means necessary, to smear, to trash, to try and halt the Daily Kos onslaught.

And what about those Talking Points Memo guy's - I mean, Gonzales has nearly been totally ruined by those guys. And in the end, Bush probably will be too, but it couldn't happen to a nastier Priznut and his nasty little VP too.

I don't know Mr Drum. When I think of you and George Orwell, I find the similarities a lot more striking than the differences. I mean you never volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but I guess you were too young at -12.

As for Edmund Wilson, I must say you are considerably less enthusiastic about Vladimir Lenin, but aside from that little detail, you have a lot in common.

As Orwell wrote "are not judged by their 'standing' but by their works." Mr Schickel and Richard Ford might consider giving old George a read.

Opinion for me, but not for thee.

I suspect that Schickel is more worried about the (not particularly bloggy) online exposure given to quotemills and junket-whores in the film reviewing trade.

I wonder if Shickel and Ford realize how pedestrian their opinions are in this case. Anyone -- critic, business, industry, artist -- mouths something to this effect when they can't keep up with the new thing.

He's just afraid he's going to lose his place at the "Big Table" and he's pissed.

Conference on State of Newspaper Industry Draws Huge Crowd

by Ian Elwood, 2007-05-18

On May 14th, Stanford University and McClatchy Company co-sponsored a free community forum at Cubberly Auditorium to discuss the fate of the newspaper industry. Speakers included Bill Keller,Executive Editor of the New York Times, Gary Pruitt, Chief Executive Officer of McClatchy, Marissa Mayer, Vice President of search productsand user experience at Google, and Harry Chandler, a former executive at the Los Angeles Times. It was the 41st of such events sponsored by McClatchy.

Titled, "Pressing Times: Can Newspapers Survive in the New World of Journalism?," the event drew a capacity crowd and left the impression that these executives had very little hope for the newspaper industry of the future.

"The inevitable conclusion is that newspapers are dying," offered Pruitt. Joel Brinkley, a journalism professor at Stanford, gave a summary that the four panelists had a hard time denying — the survival of the newspaper industry is threatened, and the Internet is the cause of it.

(...)

It is clear that at least three out of the four panelists believed that newspapers as we know them will not exist for much longer, but their hope is that what comes will still be a venue for quality journalism, despite the loss of the printed word.

Richard Schickel? So I guess this means he is still alive. Oh my.

So am I!

> Does he truly believe that bloggers think
> their work belongs in the same pantheon
> as Edmund Wilson and George Orwell?

I don't know who Digby "really" is (she might be a famous tenured professor of political science for all we know), but I would say her current-events political writing is as good or better than Orwell's. Orwell himself was an agitator, polemicist, and broadsheet writer among other things (including a failure as a policemen - was that part of his "earning" his right to write political analysis?).

Cranky

General Dodonna: Well, the Empire doesn't consider a small one-man fighter to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. An analysis of the plans provided by Princess Leia has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station. But the approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this trench and skim the surface to this point. The target area is only two meters wide. It's a small thermal exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the reactor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should desall you wantroy the station. Only a precise hit will set off a chain reaction. The shaft is ray-shielded, so you'll have to use proton torpedoes.

Wedge Antilles (Red 2): That's impossible! Even for a computer.

Luke: It's not impossible. I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home, they're not much bigger than two meters.

General Dodonna: Then man your ships. And may the Force be with you.

Bloggers are womp rat shooters. They may lack the training of a Wedge Antilles but they are willing to take the shot that by training Wedge Antilles has falsely concluded is impossible.

I'd bet Schickel is primarily offended by Ain't It Cool News, whose existence rather defines him out of the conversation.

There's high-brow and low-brow, and the middle doesn't read, and if they do, they don't read Schickel.

They're giving it away for free.
He expects to be paid for it.
You wonder why he's bitter?

Sorry, but as long as the people on the teevee keep putting on Fred Kagan, a man who has been a relentless cheerleader for America's greatest foreign policy blunder ever, a man who has been factually wrong on every issue of consequence in this fool's war, I'm not gonna be particularly impressed with "professional" opinionmakers.

Seriously, how often do they put on the people--military and civilian--who have been consistently right about Iraq? Is the key qualification for professional criticism the fact that your predictions and observations are completely off the mark?

That Times piece quoted someone to the effect that blogging is not writing at all but a form of speech, which sounds right at first but really isn't when you think about it. Bloggers edit, rewrite; adopt writerly not speakerly syntax; don't get to watch people's faces as they react, etc. This idea both fails to give bloggers enough respect and lets them off the hook too easily.

It seems that these newspaper men and women get all worked up and attack the blogs. Mostly their comments are uninformed if they in fact do not read the blogs, and if they do read them, then they are lying. The blogs hurt them because in the past the pundits could safely ignore the great unwashed masses because so few letters that were allowed to get through to the light of day. Now some very informed comments can instantly be seen. If the pundit is saying something worthwhile, then the comments will reflect that, unless the commenter is a troll. If the pundit is dishing out nonsense, the blogosphere will call it that, unless it is a sock puppet.

Thank God for the MSM, which knows well how to properly label these upstarts, especially when they dare meddle with politics.

You don't see Paul Krugman being threatened by blogs because he's got a bitchin' day job. That is the future of punditry, a part-time, ad hoc gig. That looks scary to career magazine and newspaper writers. I'm sure for free lancers it's par for teh course.

The point I find most fascinating is from Ford 'Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership'.

The difference is that bloggers have a direct, personal, and responsible relationship with their readers, especially when they have comments. Facts that are wrong get corrected, writing that is sloppy gets criticized, and bad bloggers (ones who write such things) are, in the end, ignored. Bad reviewers frequently get a pass from their institutions, which are far more important to them than their readers.

And how is it they view their readers? Well, apart from their elite cocktail party friends, they view them as

Yes, it's shocking that the masses who should be grateful start expressing themselves, even if they don't often mention Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve. (I don't often see that luminary bruited about in modern literary reviews either, btw.)

In the end, it comes down to raw snobbery - they believe, and state it, that they are qualified to have opinions, and the rest of us are not. They are qualified to tell us what to think, and we are qualified to listen to their discourse quietly, on the side, like a child who should be seen and no heard (or, pay them and not be heard from.)

Schickel festishizes Orwell, and yet fails to note that Orwell started life not as a writer or an academic (he never went to college, although he did go to Eton), but as a police officer in India. He later fought in the Spanish Civil War, wandered as a tramp, and experienced life. These experiences no doubt informed his essays, his criticism, and his literary works.

If literature, and art in general, have anything to say about the human condition, why should a tiny cadre of humanity have the right to discuss it and have their opinions known? Academic credintials, and the ability to get hired by a media conglomerate, are surely not the only ways to demonstrate an opinion has value. Surely we can measure that value in other ways, and different people can value different opinions differently. One reviewer may delve deep in the social context of a work, and another may be better at telling you whether it's funny or not. There's room for a wide variety of opinion, and sometimes a work should be judged on its own merits, not weighed down by a laborius infusion of contextual placement.

Based on this article, Schickel is not someone whom I'd care to read, because he wouldn't respect my opinion, or the opinions of those he regards as beneath his lofty perch A man that has no capacity to listen is simply someone that I doubt is worth my time.

Sure, there are plenty of blogs/bloggers who are simply average Joes spouting their half-informed opinions, but there are so many bloggers that eventually the people with something to say and the expertise to back it up, float to the top. Or even people who perhaps lack the 'proper' credentials but nevertheless 'get it.'

Newspaper pundits, like the papers themselves, are a dying breed. The new generation - those under 30 - are likely completely unaccustomed to getting their news from a dead tree medium. I am 41 years old, I started reading at 3, I was politically conscious by 11, and I was reading newspapers from front to back since, oh, I don't know, 10? 11? 12?

Gradually, as newspapers began filling their pages with more and more advertising, I stopped reading them so much. Finally, about 6 or 7 years ago, I quit subscribing. I just wasn't motivated to sit down and read a paper. It seemed like an awful waste of resources and my time as well, to pay to get something delivered to my house, much of which ended up thrown away (in the recycle bin...) either because I lacked the motivation or the time to read it.

I was and am still interested in politics and current events, but I get nearly all of my news on the web. I subscribe to the Sunday paper, but mainly because of the coupons. Occasionally there is a local story of interest, but that's not enough to compel me to subscribe seven days a week.

If a hard-core news junkie like myself is no longer interested in newspapers, then the industry really is in deep doo-doo...

Look, you idiots!

We let you vote for us, Me and Not Me. What more do you want?

"You don't see Paul Krugman being threatened by blogs because he's got a bitchin' day job."

Bullshit.

You don't see him bitching about being threatened by blogs because he's been RIGHT on his NYT blog.

It's only the people who have been, and continue to be wrong who are threatened, and hence bitching.

Seriously, how often do they put on the people--military and civilian--who have been consistently right about Iraq? Is the key qualification for professional criticism the fact that your predictions and observations are completely off the mark?

excellent point, and one made consistently by bloggers and most recently in a list compiled by Bill Moyers.

Take a look at all the pro-war pundits - Bill Kristol etc. - who have been richly rewarded by the media for being 100% wrong. Then take a look at all the anti-war figures - Scott Ritter, for instance - who are largely ignored. Hell, CBS just fired Gen. Batiste for cutting a TV spot against the war.

Apparently, the MSM's notion of 'credentials' has far more to do with having the 'right' opinions and whose cocktail parties one is invited to, rather than anything to do with actually being right about significant issues.

"You don't see Paul Krugman being threatened by blogs because he's got a bitchin' day job."

Bullshit.

You don't see him bitching about being threatened by blogs because he's been RIGHT on his NYT blog.

It's only the people who have been, and continue to be wrong who are threatened, and hence bitching. And just like Drums example-du-jour, they implicitly want to excise *correctness* from the list of desiderata of punditry.

People like Schickel and media opinion columnists are facing the fact that they have competition now. Opinionating isn't that hard (in sharp contrast to newsgathering), and there are lots of film buffs and political junkies out there who now have their own venues. Those guys main advantage has been their position with a major media outlet, and much of that advantage has been lost. So they're terrified; they are finding out that they have no real reason to exist any more.

They always talk about (usually nonspecific) blogospheric crimes, but they never admit that none of this probably would have happened at all if the media hadn't gone into steep decline starting in about 1994 (or even 1984).

There are really only about three to five major-media political columnists that I read much any more (except for laughs), and I read them mostly on the internet.

Richard Schickel is like Gene Shalit minus the gravitas and the moustache. Fuck 'im.

The MSM have become cranky Mr. Wilson, trying to chase those blogger kids off their lawn.

Utterly predictable.

It never ceases to amaze me that people like Schickle can continue to speak to one audience (the print audience, their peers) as though the other audience (blog readers and writers) are an entirely different animal. It seems to have escaped his notice that as poll after poll shows us the blog audience is older, richer, whiter, and better educated than it had originally been thought to be. The people who read blogs are the same people that Schickle and others used to control access to. We were highly educated before, and we are highly educated now. To my mind the reason the Schickle's and their reviews are dying is that his readers are quite a bit more likely than they used to be to be educated enough not to need shickle's help reading or watching a movie.

I actually just had a really good internet talk with our local tv reviewer about the deficiencies in his account of a recent Frontline story. He was very polite about my very intemperate attack on his review but one thing that was clear to both of us is that I was at least as well educated, if not better, than he was and that my opinion of his opinion was well informed. Rather than assuming that the blogs are filled with sans culottes I usually assume that I'm encountering hundreds of potential subject area specialists. I tread carefully and try to remember that someone posting under a very silly pseudonym may have spent years working on the obscure political or social point we are debating. That is *never* the case, or almost never the case, when I read a review or a casual article by someone with "stamped by the MSM " on their rear.

aimai

But newspaper book reviews are, and always have been, terrible! They all cover the same high-PRed, low-value books, and they're nearly always boring and often incompetent.

Some magazines and journals do much better, but for variety and depth, online reviews are best.

Powell's bookstore provides online a usually good daily book review from an assortment of magazines.

What a stupid article. Schickel says

I don't think it's impossible for bloggers to write intelligent reviews. I do think, however, that a simple "love" of reading (or movie-going or whatever) is an insufficient qualification for the job. That way often leads to cultishness (see the currently inflated reputations of Philip K. Dick or Cornell Woolrich, both easy reads for lazy, word-addicted minds).

The second point is that whatever inflated reputation PKD has, it wasn't bloggers who gave it to him. Who decides what writers go into the Library of America? I'm not sure, but I'm sure it wasn't decided by bloggers.

Fredrick Jameson is a card-carrying "literary critic", not just a fan who likes to read, and he called PKD "The Shakespeare of science fiction". But then, is Shakespeare important literature, or just pop entertainment for Elizabethans with lazy minds?

Ah yes, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a name bruited in the blogosphere about 500 times on blogspot alone, I'll warrant. Clowns like Schickel should learn about Google before they opine.

poor guy, afraid of the fearsome gesalt of the "blog" experience.

look around, the comments above are so funny, clever and soaked through and through by the surrounding culture as to made the regular mainstream media look uni-dimensional.

they're pissed off at blogs in the same way radio folk were pissed off by television.

with blogs the level of debate has risen by the multiplication of those involved, so instead of looking at things in one perspective multiple perspectives become the reality.... and that's not too acceptable for those whose life is structured not to accept multiple perspectives.

Richard Shickel was writing movie reviews for Life magazine when LBJ was President.

When you are in the court of the naked Emperor, there is no enemy more vile, more vulgar, more badly educated, and with more poorly developed taste, than the little boy who pointed at His Majesty and insisted that He was wearing no clothes.

My guess is that a pretentious twit like Richard Ford, who has never bothered to read a literary blog, has probably never been to Terre Haute either.

There are good reasons to disagree with Schickel, but why sneer at him for having being around a long time? I find that people who have been around a long time often have the better perspective. I myself go around looking for them and grab them by the lapels and beg them to tell me things. And though I love blogs and gain greatly from them, they spawn a lot of bad things. On blogs you get web serfs, you get herd-think, lots of people doing anything but thinking. The blog world is very unpleasant in many ways, and people outside it, even those who don't mind its rough-and tumble qualities, its language, its occasional rudeness, react with distaste to its basic psychology. They are onto something that deserves more attention and more effort at improvement.

I think the success of the "PDQ Bach" thing went to this guy's head. Although, I think I read (as in, it was bruited about) that Sainte-Beuve may have written the definitive analysis and critique of PDQ's oeuvre, so Schickel feels free to name-drop. Of course, Sainte-Beuve was vicious when it came to "Eine kleine nichtmusik", so there's also probably some mixed feelings there.

Kevin, when you said to Gene,

"The Saint-Beuve line cracked me up. I mean, was Schickel trying to seem like a pretentious twit?"

You're onto something.

Yes, he is actually trying to seem like a pretentious twit. No one could have done such a smashing job of it without trying.

Why?

What's really up with all the sanctimonious hostility towards bloggers?

It it really that their turf is being cut into? Is it fear of loss of income? Or just snobbery?

No. It's just plain old schoolyard nonsense.

They like being the in-crowd. They really like those coctail weenies. And they love quail.

How dare anyone else think they can get in without their permission?

Freedom of speech? When is stops mattering to the press, you know there's pure bullshit at work.

And this is pure bullshit.

Let's do a bit of logic here.

Schickel: People "need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion."

If people must prove that they have the right to an opinion, then it follows that some people must not have the right to one: if everyone has that right, no one needs to prove they have it.

Now it's essentially impossible to read a book or view a movie without having an opinion about it. It follows that those who don't have the right to an opinion had best not read books or view movies, lest they form an opinion, thus claiming this right that they don't have.

So what Schickel is saying is that reading books and watching movies is an activity for the elite, and plebians should leave these activities to their betters.

Typical Schickel. Don't worry about him or pay much attention to him. He's always been this way, as long as I can remember - and that goes back about 50 yrs or so.

"They need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion."

What a pretentious statement by Schickel! I was always under the impression that we're all allowed our opinions; whether or not someone listens to them depends on the validity of the arguments used to support them.

This statement in itself illustrates nicely why the MSM critics and newsmen are becoming increasingly irrelevant and consequently feel threatened: they've set themselves apart from 'ordinary men'. When someone tells me that he knows better than I do because of his status or position, not his reasoning, I pretty much know that he doesn't have a rhetorical leg to stand on.

Richard Ford owes his reputation to the fine services of the courtier class comprising today's critics.

Who can be surprised that he has no use for a new group of people who haven't yet lavished praise on him?

Why earn your reputation twice, when the first one may have been, for all you know or fear, a fluke?

Clearly, he's been stewing about this a long time. Back in March, Kathy at Birmingham Blues wrote about a writers' conference at which Schickel spoke...and called bloggers 'idiots'.

Now we know why Bush wanted to Wiretap WITHOUT FISA oversight:

Suit claims US illegally spied on detainees' lawyers

Los Angeles Times, CA - May 18, 2007
By Henry Weinstein, Times Staff Writer. A civil liberties organization on Thursday sued the Justice Department and the National Security Agency in New York ...

...The lawyers, who work at some powerful and deep-pocketed law firms such as Shearman & Sterling and Dorsey & Whitney have essentially been turned into de facto terror suspects simply for doing their jobs.

New York lawyer Wells Dixon, one of the plaintiffs, had this to say to the LA Times: "I am outraged that the NSA and DOJ have categorically refused to say whether they have eavesdropped — without a warrant — on me or other attorneys simply because we have fought for basic due process for men imprisoned without charge or trial at Guantanamo."

It stands to reason that the lawyers want the spying documents in order to pursue a larger case against the NSA. This may be one fight the government shouldn't have picked.

Bush wanted to listen to people he didn't like. I bet the Bushies even listened to congressional Dems phone conversations too. Anybody Bush label any enemy most likely got wiretapped.

I mean, would those FISA lawyers ever have agreed to that kind of wiretapping?

I don't think so.

Cap'n Obvious is right. These people are used to controlling the conversation and a bunch of noisy nobodies shouting them down on the internets rattles their cages. It reminds of what Paul Valery once said to Andre Gide about Flaubert's remark to George Sand the the effect that . . . . .

Although there are undoubtedly some good journalists and good reviewers, as a group they collectively suck more than any profession I can think of, except for maybe politicians. Blogs also vary greatly in quality. Most readers are astute enough to find the good reporters and good bloggers. Just because someone is paying these opinionated pundits and reviewers for their work doesn't mean it's any good. As for Shickel in particular, as Fides pointed out above, why would we respect his opinions when he doesn't seem to respect ours?

Another point must be that Schickel thinks bloggers are idiots because they're doing a lot of work and not getting paid for it.

The average blogger probably does a hundred times as much work as Schickel.

And that's just his blog.

Just one small point.

If there's any group in the entirety of the "elite" class of pundits who might fear for the preservation of their status and clout, it should be the commentators on art.

Even the political pundits, who are at least remarking on points that sometimes have a testable component, for example, the potential political fortunes of candidates, or the success in the real world of a given foreign policy, have been shown to be flat out wrong, indeed shamefully wrong, in their predictions. The blogosphere has scorned them in consequence.

If even those pundits who deal with matters with some undeniable component of objectivity have been exposed as irrelevant and riddled with fakery, what is to become of those commentators who truck almost entirely in subjectivity, such as those who presume to tell the masses what good art is supposed to be?

Schickel knows perfectly well that it's either him or the bloggers.

He plunks down hard on him.

I find that people who have been around a long time often have the better perspective.

That process appears not to have taken in Schickel's case.

Ah, Kevin

It's so typical of liberal bloggers to hurl their crude obscenities at patriots like Richard Schickelgruber while they endlessly praise communist propagandists like George Cloony and Michael More. I get my movie recommendations from the Washington Times and I never buy French popcorn if I can help it.

What I never understood about the grumpy buggy-whippers is why they assume bloggers don't have to prove themselves or pay their dues. Sure, some bloggers got a lot of attention for no good reason (Anna Marie Cox, all of Pajamas Media) but others have been doing this for YEARS. I've read Kevin Drum since his old blog focussing on California, and Josh Marshall since he was a one-man show writing in his spare time. I've had a blog for over 8 years and average...12 readers a day. And that's pretty good! So my question for Schickel would be this: Do you have any idea what you're talking about? Because it don't sound like you do.

When I think of the blogs I usually read and the "qualifications" of the bloggers in question:

Balkinzation - group of law professors from Yale, Harvard, Columbia, etc.

Sullivan - Harvard Ph.D.

Glenn Greenwald - constitional lawyer, NYU

TPM - Josh Marshall - Princeton, Brown Ph.D.

How could anyone takes these guys seriously? I mean, really, they are obviously just guys in their bathrobes without a "right to an opinion."

Not that I care for the kind of crass, pathetic credentialism that Schickel is pushing in any case. Really, Mr. Schickel, you are just a pompous twit.

While there must certainly be an element of élitism involved, this can't be the whole answer, not only because this has long been a fact of life (how many times has one heard 'critical but not popular success' or vice versa?), but because it seems people who have this attitude wallow in their élitism.

I think the problem with the blogs is that people with whom these critics interact regularly read blogs, as opposed to the letters to the editor et cetera which was their previous exposure to hoi polloi. Now every person they see on a regular basis is likely to say 'I've been reading a lot of stuff that disagrees with your review of so and so.' This gives people a few talking points with which to disagree with the reviewer, and can not be confined to working hours.

Dear Mr. Schickel,

When irredeemable hacks like Tom Friedman and David Brooks are banished forever from the pinnacle of American journalism into jobs writing IHOP lunch menu inserts then come and lecture me on the inherent lumpenness of blogs, and the seriousness of American journalistic letters.

Until then, kindly STFU and stick to wringing new ways of saying "Film suck ass. Schickel Smash!" out your thesaurus.

These dinosaurs will be gone in twenty years.

Dear Mr. Schickel,

When irredeemable hacks like Tom Friedman and David Brooks are banished forever from the pinnacle of American journalism into jobs writing IHOP lunch menu inserts then come and lecture me on the inherent lumpenness of blogs, and the seriousness of American journalistic letters.

Until then, kindly STFU and stick to wringing new ways of saying "Film suck ass. Schickel Smash!" out your thesaurus.

Iv'e read many Amazon book reviews in the comment section that are very informative, substantial, and eloquent...amazingly so. The authors cant be writing ALL of them.

Richard Schickel is a man of considerable accomplishment (30 documentaries and a bunch of books). It's a bit pathetic that he is reduced to this kind of tantrum. To quote the man himself:
...the review's highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.

Unfortunately, his commentary on blogging embodies this virtue not at all. By failing to put a single substantive point on the table he reduces his own commentary to the whine of priviledge threatened.

There is plenty of irony in the fact that it is precisely the dialog permitted by blogging that threatens the credibility of his pronuciatos.

His op-ed really bothered me, for a number of different reasons. Apparently, according to Mr. Schickel, I have no business recommending books on my personal blog to friends. Leave it to him, to both realize if something is worth reviewing and then give his stamp of approval (or not).

No worries the book industry is in such dire straits these days, considering the gatekeepers.

Phew! - a lot of passion here (as usual)...
Anyway... perhaps a different view from me (partly 'just for kicks').

I think Schickel did himself no favors in the manner he wrote this OpEd, but I feel there's at least SOME merit to his perspective. How about looking at it through the prism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts"?

When it comes to film criticism, Schickel's just parotting something Roger Ebert's been proclaiming for years; namely that people who haven't really studied the "art" & "history" of film aren't as credible as critics who have.
There's SOME merit to that - as there is to the counterarguments this thread is full of.

- For one thing - 'right off the bat' - let's differentiate film "reviewers" from film "critics" please. Great film reviews are often great because the context of the analysis encompasses a much wider range than the opinions of a movie fans who aren't well versed in the entire scope - the great breadth & depth - of films... (For an example, I'll cite Ebert's complimentary commentary on the dvd of the film "Dark City." I know & love movies, but I learned a heckuva lot from Ebert's veritable dissertation. Film lovers - check it out :)

- The irony, OTOH, is how even really learned critics so often demonstrate abysmal ignorance of particular genres. (Schickel really 'steps in it' in his derogatory comments about Philip Dick.) The example that's kinda driven me crazy for decades is the science fiction genre in general. I just LOVE Pauline Kael's work, as I often enjoy Ebert's... But look at what they've written about great science fiction films! It's hilarious how 'out of their element' they so frequently are: if not in regard to "film," but "science fiction" (& yes, "Horror". (Ebert's reviews of Star War & [especially] Star Trek films are rife w/this: his evidenced (& total - lol) confusion concerning such science fiction canards as 'time travel paradoxes' and faster-than-light space travel can be knee-slappingly hilarious.

To wrap... I'm not necessarily arguing w/you delightful folks - but am trying to suggest that there are merits to the ideas behind Schickel's inadequately laid out argument.
- A great critic's work excites the reader and expands his appreciation of the art form in a way (what Schickel would probably call) a "layman" couldn't.

I won't necessarily agree w/the conclusions of an expert on Shakespeare because he's an acknowledged expert on the Bard's work: but I'll reflexively give him more 'bemefit of the doubt' than I would to someone whose knowledge of Shakespeare's work is limited a couple of film adaptations of the Bard's work...

I have to prove my right to an opinion?! I don't think so. It is an inalienable right. It is easier to imagine that all humans have opinions than that they have souls.

If Mr. Schickel means that one must prove that one's opinion should be valued, I would agree.

Unfortunately, his failure to say that (or perhaps even mean that) persuades me that his opinions have no value.

LOL. He called Edmund Wilson a "bok reviewer." A book reviewer. It's like calling Wolfgang Puck a "cook." I'm still laughing at it. And then he cites Orwell, who was a pure hack reviewer, and who often spent more time in his "reviews" spewing his own opinions than discussing the authors'. But comparing bloggers to literary lions like Orwell or Wilson is as good a way as any of disparaging the bloggers, so the guy goes ahead and does it.

By the way... Anyone who has read Orwell's "As I Please" columns, which in many ways are the most enjoyable-to-read stuff Orwell ever wrote, would instantly recognize work that was a precursor to what many bloggers do these days. A lot of those columns are online somewhere, and I highly recommend them as an example of the kind of impassioned, partisan, well-reasoned sniping that the better bloggers do. Orwell, like the bloggers of today, was largely shut out of the major opinion venues, so he found a small newspaper that was willing to allow him the freedom to say what he liked, and he took advantage of it. And just like the bloggers of today, he pissed off a lot of people who were wed to a twisted, ruling orthodoxy, just by speaking his mind.

My, my. Isn't Mr. Schickel a little late for the party? Has he been in a coma for the last two years? Bashing blogs because we are so, well, unqualified, by those who are actually no better qualified but have merely conned somene else into paying for their airspace is so, like, 2005.

Next project for Mr. Scheckel is to get a comfy chair by the shore and hold back the tide by raising his hand. There's an open seat between King Canute and David Broder.

Yes, well, tough-sounding talk from Mr. Schickel, but what precisely does he think he's going to DO about all us unsanctified, unwashed bloggers? C'mon, Dick: what's your big plan to stop us?

He has bit of "And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!"

"Richard Ford, a blog detractor: "Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide."

Hmmmm, a book editor? An editor? Maybe like the "editors" at Fox News who "judge" and "filter" based on Rupert Murdoch's and the PNAC Republicans evil schemes?

In fact, we heard recently that Rupert Murdoch now wants to own Dow Jones (and gain control of the Wall Street Journal) to turn the WSJ into Fox News: The Print Edition...no matter what promises Murdoch makes that the WSJ will remain independent and untainted by his foul touch.

Editors? Filters? Judgers?

Like on the right-wing-packed Supreme Court? Like in the right-wing-packed Justice Department with Gonzales, Sampson and especially Goodling acting as "editors" filtering out the "rule of law" and replacing the "rule of law" with their hardcore, racist, ultra-orthodox Republican agenda.

Yeah, that's what our democracy needs...more traitorous, right-wing "editors."

I read a national paper, a local paper, and blogs every day. The blog commentary is far superior to the newspapers. Glenn Greenwald, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos (I've contributed to all three) vs Charles Krauthammer (both papers), Victor Davis Hanson, Jonah Goldberg, Mona Charen, etc. People who wonder why MSM is struggling should read these blogs/columns; their question would be quickly answered. The quality of MSM commentary is poor. It's only a matter of time before I drop the newspapers. Richard Schickel, it is called competition. Everyone faces it. Get better or go out of business.

Of course it's formallement interdit for the blog-bashers to mention the main reason why their media has lost so much credibility in recent years, namely their "coverage" of the Iraq War and its preliminaries.

When your journalism begins to resemble that of Izvestia 40 years ago people tend to disbelieve you...

Status anxiety in our emerging plutocracy is showing up in the oddest places these days.

"Richard Ford, a blog detractor: "Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide."

Hmmmm, a book editor? An editor? Maybe like the "editors" at Fox News who "judge" and "filter" based on Rupert Murdoch's and the PNAC Republicans evil schemes?

In fact, we heard recently that Rupert Murdoch now wants to own Dow Jones (and gain control of the Wall Street Journal) to turn the WSJ into Fox News: The Print Edition...no matter what promises Murdoch makes that the WSJ will remain independent and untainted by his foul touch.

Editors? Filters? Judgers?

Like on the right-wing-packed Supreme Court? Like in the right-wing-packed Justice Department with Gonzales, Sampson and especially Goodling acting as "editors" filtering out the "rule of law" and replacing the "rule of law" with their hardcore, racist, ultra-orthodox Republican agenda.

Yeah, that's what our democracy needs...more traitorous, right-wing "editors." Not!!!

French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a name not much bruited in the blogosphere, I'll warrant

O RLY?

A quick Google Blog Search on the name turns up nearly 100 mentions, almost all before this article was released.

So much for that assumption...

Quite an impressive set of comments.

There's an open seat between King Canute and David Broder.

I thought Canute didn't expect to hold back the tide. He performed the futile gesture to knock some sense into toadies osmotically drunk on his power.

great post,Kevin. Ford's comment is either uninformed or disingenuous. How many newspapers in this country even HAVE a fulltime book critic or even a legitimate book review section that gathers the reviews of the few reviewers there are? Most serious literary criticism doesn't get anywhere newspapers or Time Magazine; it goes straight to literary journals or magazines or stays in the classroom. What's the difference between a blogger with a literary background and a print writer with a literary background who's gotten lucky enough to get a job doing reviews or make a freelance living doing it? Nothing really. Shickel and Ford see the marketplace of ideas as closed to anyone but the few who already have keys to get in it. Which explains why, in the literary world, there is so much logrolling when it comes to reviews. ``I've got a novel coming out; I'll be nice to Ford in my review so he'll feel like giving me a blurb for the jacket of my book.'' I think it was Spy Magazine that took dead aim at this incestuous hypocrisy and made it a monthly skewering.

I thought Richard Schickel was deceased, it's been so long since I've read outlets like Time. In any case, he has it exactly wrong, it is among bloggers and their readers that references to Sainte-Beuve are likely to survive. Magazines like Time and Newsweek have dumbed down and compromised their product so much that readers of all sorts are leaving them in droves. He's just lashing out because he senses the end is near.

Articles like this only increase the popularity of blogs. I remember before the war, I was using the Internet to read online newspapers and the occasional op ed in the Economist online. I read something about "the blogs" and became curious. I googled the word "blog" and I haven't read the NYT online in over three years.

Blogs(political blogs anyway) are like being in a bar filled with people bitching about politics. Only the bar has no walls and no limits and instead of just your drunken crony buds, there are heaps and heaps of really smart people in the bar.

What is it they say, don't worry about what they say about you in the paper, just make sure they spell your name right? He spelled "blog" right.

OK, I didn't read Schickel's entire piece, but I'm willing to be that he didn't have any substantive survey work or critique of actual material by bloggers to offer - he just doesn't like "the idea" of them. Whether, like Ford, he actually never reads their material or not, it's the same "won't look through the telescope" prejudicial attitude.

I think it is particularly hilarious for "earned" critics to be picking on literary blgggers, considering the risible psychobabble put out by academic literary theorists in recent decades (remember post-modernism? It kind of reminds me of clear Pepsi...)

Yes, blogosphere, keep patting yourself on the back! Even though there are more people writing blogs than could possibly consume them, and the average blog has

Damn straight, only elitist snobs should critique elitist snobs, takes one to know one and all that.

Well, we know that Schickel is a terrible researcher. He missed this more nuanced piece by Josh Getlin about the very thing he's writing about...

Battle of the book reviews.

It appeared in the same newspaper where he's a regular reviewer, so maybe he didn't miss but chose to ignore it so he could write a more simple-minded piece.

What amazes me, Kevin, is that when it comes to these old media tantrum pieces about blogs and bloggers all standards for knowing what you're talking about go out the window. You don't have to actually examine blogs; you examine someone else's op-ed or feature article about them.

Schickel's and Ford's comments show clearly that either neither one has read Foucault on regimes of truth, or neither one understood what they read. Either case should be cause for a priori disqualification as any kind of serious critic, in any genre.

I don't know who comes out best, but Richard Ford is a damned good writer, who probably has enough to do in his life withoug wading through literary blogs. Try his Frank Bascombe triligy.

" ...Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Ford, a blog detractor: "Mr. Ford, who has never looked at a literary blog, said he wanted the judgment and filter that he believed a newspaper book editor could provide. 'Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership,' Mr. Ford said, ..."

Yeah like the time when the New York Times had Joe Lelyveld review a book he'd never read and other like examples from the "responsible" press which all too often uses a book review to do a political hit. And how "responsible" is it for Ford to criticize a genre he's never examined? A lot like the Joe Lelyveld incident.

I wouldn't question Ford's qualifications as a writer of fiction, but to acknowledge you don't read blogs and then pass judgment on them is lazy, at the least. That's a statement that ought to make him wince to see it in print. It would be like me saying I've never read any of Ford's books, but he can't possibly be as good as Herman Melville, William Faulkner, etc.

As with anything else, the blogs have a large percentage of drivel, a large percentage of middling stuff, and a smaller percentage of higher-quality writing, more or less in the same amounts as any other type of media. From what I've seen, I'd put most of Schickel's stuff in the middle. Anyone can pick examples of terrible stuff on the blogs (as they just as easily can in movie and book reviews in magazines and newspapers). The fact is that these guys are just unwilling to take the time to do a little looking around--if they had, they'd soon enough find some quality writing and analysis. Instead, they choose to act huffy like Joe Klein and pretend they're the only thing keeping civilization alive.

And, just to add, all this outrage is misplaced--we've had over six years of an administration without qualifications pretending to run our country, and precious few of our magazines and newspapers having been raising any stink about that.

Schickel's always been a good middlebrow reviewer; his venues tell the tale. He's gotten access to Clint Eastwood and paid for it with "measured" criticism. His commentary on "Unforgiven" was lightweight and more suited to something written for Bob Dorian than a major film critic.
I don't know why he feels threatened by the blogs, unless he saw some unusually good work in one, by someone whose name got mentioned around his office. There's a lot of crap on the blogs, but it's not like there's not a lot of crap printed on paper. I know that I can't read some reviews in the NYT without feeling that the writer was born about the time of Reagan's second term--it does, however, result in the most entertaining corrections a week or so later.

I find it hard to consider blogs without thinking about samizdat in the old USSR and the underground press in the old USA.

Samizdat, meaning self published, is what they called the carbon copied publications produced by Soviet dissidents in a world with a government controlled press, well guarded copying machines, registered typewriters and barely legal carbon paper.

The underground press was the 1960s answer to the establishment media which toed the party line on the Vietnam War, and to a lesser extent on sex, drugs and rock and roll. Compared to the establishment media, the underground press was a wide open party, and they'd use the f word.

Both were responses to a closed media and a societal need for new voices. The internet makes it much easier to get the word out, and there is a much broader range of opinion than is accepted by our corporate media. Through the 19th and 20th centuries, the trend was towards efficiency of scale in news coverage. Eventually, we had a handful of networks, a handful of magazines and a handful of newspapers. On the internet, the capital is in the network, so publication costs are low, and scale simply. That means it is economic to blog for a single friend or just for yourself, if you have the time and something to say, but if enough people are interested, you could blog for the nation or the world.

Richard Shickel is a relic of the world of high cost media. Just as Gutenberg and Martin Luther shattered Christianity with their injunction to read the Bible, there are many more voices today.

let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: richard schickel is a dickhead.

your pal,
blake

I am so above all of this.

Just saying.

Schickel is like one of those people in the 1800s who are rumored to have feared that the human body could not sustain a 40 mph train ride and the body would get ripped apart due to the sheer speed.

The advantage in reading newspapers and magazines as opposed to blogs is to concentrate reliable sources and cut a very significant amount of dross that isn't worth the time.

The fact that newspapers are helping to make themselves irrelevant at the same time that our education system seems to be doing the same will require the blogosphere to pick up the informational and critical slack, but needs the reader to be educatedly critical also -- one of the items disappearing from education.

Having postings rated by readers (both the main blog and reader postings) helps to speed the reading although I can never stop myself from reading the almost continuous drivel from those such as Al, egbert, never-ever, and the like, who, I note, did not post here yet, except that delightful imitation.

Nice touch on the French popcorn!

I thought it would be maïs éclaté, or maïs Américain, but no; it's pop-corn.

Kevin Drum writes: So what is it? Merely the fact that this is happening on a different and modestly larger stage than before? Is that really so threatening?

Yes.

This has been another edition of S9's Obvious Answers To Naïve Questions.

Regarding SFAW's comment about PDQ Bach. I think SFAW has confused Richard Schickel and Peter Schickele, the world's foremost (and only) scholarly expert on ol' PDQ. Richard Schickel doesn't have that much imagination or, evidently, humor.

Wheezer

Ford clearly doesn't like competition(unlike most writers, he's honest about it):

Which is why Richard Ford, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel "Independence Day" and has just published the novel "The Lay of the Land," has this sobering message for budding writers:

"I always say the same thing: Talk yourself out of it if you can," he says, "which is the same advice I would give somebody if they're about to get married. Because, if you can't talk yourself out of it, you're on your way to a vocation, I think."

Regarding SFAW's comment about PDQ Bach. I think SFAW has confused Richard Schickel and Peter Schickele, the man who deserves credit for rediscovering old PDQ. Richard Schickel doesn't have that much imagination.

Wheezer

Wheezer

I mean this in the nicest way possible, but ...

Please DO try to keep up.

It is not a sin to be out of your league - but only IF you don't demonstrate how proud you are to be there.

To Richard Schickel:

Demonstrate that expertise and show your work. WHY is your op valid? I never get to visit your office so I don't get to see all those shiny ribbons everyday.

I guess I am out of my league, too, SFAW, as I don't understand your PDQ Bach reference either.

SFAW, I'll add my word that you are undecipherable. I think you are making smoke for your ignorance.

Of course it is "Eine Klleiner N-A-chtmusik. NIchtmusik, of course, has a completely different meaning. Rather like your comment and its depth.

Goodnight.

Geez, SFAW makes a funny and look what happens: humorless boneheads sprout like toadstools.

Michael -
All shall become clear, etc., in a moment.

notthere -
If you're going to attempt to make a correction - though none was needed - you should at least get it right. F-ing up your sanctimonious tripe kinda kills any (hypothetical) value to your comment.

SqueakyRat -
At least there's SOMEONE here who has a clue. (Vis-a-vis my comment; not referring to the comments in general). Thanks for your help.

B-but he said "bruited"! That makes him civil!