Washington Post Radio Biased Anti Blog?
Over the weekend, I was driving around town in the gorgeous weather, listening to Washington Post Radio, hoping to get a glimpse at the Nationals game. Instead, I heard former Post columnist Bob Levey and one of the Post’s media “specialists” talking about the video that was released this past week of the plane crashing into the Pentagon on 9/11.
That didn’t faze me, but what came next was absolutely galling. In not a few short leaps, Levey moved from talking about people who don’t believe an airplane crashed into the Pentagon, to talking about webloggers are encouraging these sorts of theories online. What’s more insulting, that Levey talked about bloggers as simply conspiracy theorists, or the fact that he’s lumping all bloggers together?
I guess what I have to ask next is: Is the Post biased against bloggers? Is this some sort of mainstream media pushback against a group of writers who are stealing their Style, Sports and Business sections from them and giving them away for free to a younger demographic who no longer needs a paper copy?
Why is there such resentment for bloggers at Washington Post Radio?
Maybe the people at WaPo radio should remember that the WaPo Express paper has a blog as well. http://readexpress.com … So in a way are they beating up on themselves?
The Post has several blogs on their site. Levey was briefly a blogger himself, but stopped after a couple of weeks to “concentrate on the radio show” but DCRTV and FishbowlDC reported that there were internal tensions over him doing a blog. Levey used to have John Kelly’s beat as a daily “life in DC” columnist and it was speculated Kelly was offended.
“So, former Washington Post community columnist Bob Levey (right) recently returned and did a blog that appeared on washingtonpost.com. But it suddenly vanished. Now, we learn from columnist Marc Fisher’s online Q&A last week that Levey ‘who is doing a bang-up job as one of the weekend voices of Washington Post Radio, along with the very funny David Burd, decided to concentrate on the new radio gig rather than add one more blog here on the big website.’ However, our sources say that there’s probably more to the story than that. Might columnist John Kelly, who replaced Levey, have complained about the return of his predecessor?”
More
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/online_media/odd_blog_35632.asp
I guess they are beating up on themselves a bit, but the whole anti-blog hysteria from the media is overblown.
Color me unsurprised at Levey coming out with an ill-informed and poorly considered opinion. I did a dance of joy the first day the Post came to my door without his pointless and uninteresting ramblings polluting the comics page. If he’s got a negative opinion of bloggers it’s probably because on his best day he couldn’t manage to be half as interesting as a naval-gazing 14-year-old whining on LiveJournal.
Anybody recall the blog fiasco that The Post had a little while ago? Could that be a reason?
Isn’t that throwing the baby out with the bathwater?