Pundits of the Floating World

I think Garance's column on the dynamics of blog wars is pretty good:

Part of what’s at issue is a classic journalistic position: People who become reporters in general hate to play on anyone’s team. And to the extent that reporters who become pundits take that one-step removed attitude with them into their punditry, they generally see it as a badge of intellectual honesty. Being a reporter has always been about being in the world but not of it. But the schmoozy familiarity required to develop good sources over time often places reporters smack in the middle of the social milieus they cover in a way that elides those distinctions, and when reporters become pundits or write commentary and take sides, they’re also deeply embedding themselves in and speaking on behalf of communities that they nonetheless resist seeing themselves as members of or advocates for. That has always been a somewhat awkward position.

Now the communities in which they’ve embedded themselves are fighting back: Blog wars are a symptom of the way that political communities are fighting for direct self-representation in the public eye, rather than the mediated presentations of the reporter-pundits.

Most political bloggers on the left see their role as defenders of an intellectual and philosophical community under siege. Many of them are also Democratic Party activists in one way or another, or are in the process of becoming such. They are part of a team, and they (correctly) see themselves as reinforcements for players who have lost their touch and need fresh energy. They have no use for anyone who claims to be an expert on them and to be on their side but who writes pieces that undermine their interests, or that spend as much effort on snarkily establishing the independence of the author as on doing something useful for the team.