Josh Marshall's Pinky Finger

There was a very silly L.A. Times op-ed column this weekend deploring the rise and tone of the blogosphere. I'm not going to get into the particulars of it, because it was just very silly. But I will bring up the one line which is causing a lot of fuss this morning:

"No man but a blockhead," the stubbornly sensible Samuel Johnson said, "ever wrote but for money." Yet here are people, whole brigades of them, happy to write for free. And not just write. Many of the most active bloggers -- Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Joshua Micah Marshall and the contributors to the Huffington Post -- are insistent partisans in political debate.

You can see Marshall's followup here. I have two points to make: one, Andrew and Matt publish their blogs at the website of The Atlantic Monthly, which last time I checked was a subscription-based magazine. You know, subscriptions, those things where people pay money to read the things other people write? Josh Marshall raises money from his site; I know because I have directly donated to him in the past. And the Huffington Post is venture capital-funded with a paid staff. So basically this paragraph is just a bunch of poorly-sourced published lies. And this is what we need a mainstream media for?

Finally, the author of this silliness decries in the blogosphere the lack of "the kind of journalism that makes a difference." Frankly, Josh Marshall has more reporting acumen and ability in his pinky finger than this guy has in his entire silly body, as well as the bodies of any silly children which may have sprung from his very silly loins. The fact that he doesn't any longer work at a mainstream media outlet doesn't alter this fact one whit.