5 Feet of Fury

Peggy Noonan’s confusing screw up demonstrates a bigger problem

And accidentally explains why blogs are better.

Scott Rosenberg writes:

The problem with too many journalists — and especially those journalists inside the Beltway — is this: they do not write what they’re thinking. The reporters do not tell us what they know. The columnists and analysts do not tell us what they believe. Their resulting work is boring, uninformative, and manipulative. (…)

I know columnists are people; they have relationships to protect; they want insiders to keep talking to them. Still: virtually every journalist in DC could go a lot farther down the road of writing what they know and think. Doing so would probably earn them more respect, and more readers, and the sources and players would end up talking to them anyway.