You forgot Thunewatch, Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, and the Powerline folks.

The Argus Leader needs the attention and the interaction. As a member of the corporate media, it is governed by concerns about advertising revenues and cost-accounting, which put constraints on journalistic enterprise. There are huge areas of South Dakota that get no coverage of civic and significant social events. They have to be the site of a lurid murder or the discovery of a meth lab to get notice at all. However, the Argus Leader is by no means the only newspaper in the country to be cowed by the strident and menacing voices from the right and constant wariness about offending advertisers. However, as the only east river medium that has the possibility of supplying a journalistic record for the larger community that comprises the region, it needs encouragement to be a full-fledged newspaper. And its news management needs to set the goal of covering news according to journalistic standards, not according to the importunities of blogs. But if blogs are what it takes, so be it.


As for those other entities: What can one say?

For some months now, after the Northern Valley Beacon closed its web log version, I have appreciated reading its e-mail versions and its revised blog site free from the trolling. As a semi-retired professor of 40-some years, I found it to be informative, provocative, and, and despite what its detractors have said, free from petty name-calling and abusive insults. I liked its policy of refusing to engage in the dreadful blog cronyism and petty accusations that make so many blogs nothing more than electronic graffiti and juvenile ego-stroking. It did criticize blogging in general by making very knowledgeable comments about the kind of rhetoric and propaganda techniques to which most political discourse has descended.

Then it was picked up by the new, innovative South Dakota War College and its detractors rediscovered it and resumed their petulant accusations. They trot out their litany about hysteria, lying, irrationality, etc., about a post that I am partly responsible for. It was in response to an inquiry of mine.

The SDP post is an exercise in irony. It quotes extensively a passage (for which, as usual, the general context is omitted), protesting that the characterizations made by the NVB are unwarranted and then proceeds to demonstrate the very characteristics that the NVB post lists.

SDP takes umbrage that their site is termed malevolent and scurrilous. If the SDP posts in response to their rediscovery of the NVB are not composed exactly of those qualities, then no such things exist in human language.

That blog, along with their Sib(ling), has long since disqualified itself from respectful consideration. And since the 2004 election, their blog has raised persistent questions about affiliations with the universities with which they were associated. That has concerned me, for one, and I have raised questions a number of times. Those questions remain unanswered.

Silas:

Don't hate the players hate the game.

Epp

Dear Mr. Epp:

Your response puzzles me. I addressed the rhetorical nature of the posts. I could not tell if you were directing your remark to my observations or the posts I was commenting on.

The only way to handle trolls is to ignore them. Unmentionable and the Other Unmentionable are trolls. No comments needed.

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