Taking Issue With Non-Partisanship

Glenn Reynolds:

STRANGELY, neither Kos, Atrios, nor Josh Marshall has anything to say about RatherGate so far, though Armstrong Williams gets rather more attention. Here at InstaPundit, on the other hand, both subjects are discussed. I'm just, you know, sayin'. . . .

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Whaddaya know, the blogosphere is... partisan! Of course, the meaning of such a statement is counterintuitive. For a blogger, even a heavily limelit one like Reynolds, to pretend that the blogosphere is not partisan is either completely idiotic or smacks of the grossest hypocrisy. Reynolds could only say such a thing, even in jest, because he believes on some level that he is somehow less partisan than his liberal counterparts -- "sure, YOU'RE partisan, but I'm not." In short, pretending to not be partisan is plain stupid or just outrageously... partisan. If worth their salt, liberal bloggers will remember this foolish remark and savage Reynolds the next time Tom Delay picks up another get-out-of-jail free card from the Republican congress or Jerry Falwell attributes a flood in Silicon Valley to the use of silicon breast implants, and Reynolds obliviously frets about Prince Charles's disdain for nanotech. As Theodore Roethke said, "May my silences become more accurate."

Of course, this is aside from the fact that the Armstrong Williams story is FAR more damaging to the media's credibility than Rathergate, a point that media critic Alex Jones made earlier today on MSNBC's Countdown. An analogy: in sports, it's not momentous if a team tries too hard to win and ends up losing (Rather/Mapes), but it is momentous if the team doesn't try hard enough and ends up losing (Williams) -- this is called shaving points and calls into question the basic foundational principle of the game, that all sides are trying their hardest to win -- or, in this case, to make their OPINION win. If Dan Rather is the overzealous Pete Rose who bum-rushed the catcher in a meaningless play in a meaningless All-Star game, Armstrong Williams is the much more sinister Pete Rose who gambled on his own team's games.

And let's keep some perspective here, folks. Network news is on its way out, so Rathergate is a small fish in the big pond of history -- but we'll ALWAYS have pundits, and they'll ALWAYS need credibility, and when pundits start taking money from the government and not telling people, that will ALWAYS be a scandale majeure.