And which do you think Washington Post would love best? Tarzan, of course. I've been reading Eric Boehlert's piece in Media Matters for America, about the love-hate affair the Post has with wingnut bloggers. The Post loves them, the bloggers hate the post. That's how it sometimes goes in love:
Under normal circumstances, the recent lunch at at a Filipino cafe in Washington, D.C., between Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz and right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin would have been an awkward affair. Kurtz was there to profile Malkin for the paper's Style section, yet Malkin in her writings had made it clear she despises the mainstream media and holds the Post in contempt. ("Washington Post Sinks To A New Low," read a Malkin blog entry on July 22, 2005.) She has written that the paper's managing editor displays an "anti-American mindset" and has specifically singled Kurtz out for being a dishonest and incompetent reporter.
Talk about tension. The lunch and the subsequent feature could have set off some real fireworks with Kurtz not only defending his work and the Post's reputation, but pressing Malkin hard to explain her wild and often fact-free allegations against journalists. Instead, the profile, which skated over Malkin's anti-media rants as well as her loathing of the Post, was published as a Valentine's Day week mash note, presenting Malkin as a pugnacious, on-the-rise pundit who has her liberal critics up in arms.
As Paul McLeary noted at CJR Daily: "It really takes a talented writer to paint conservative commentator Michelle Malkin as the voice of reason. ... But the Washington Post's Howie Kurtz ... manages to do just that."
Boehlert then goes out to explain the astonishing fact that lefty/liberal/progressive bloggers don't get no love from the Washington Post. That must be because it's a masochistic newspaper and only likes the steel stiletto heel of Michelle Malkin on its throat.
This is the last paragraph of the piece and the source of the title I chose:
Two years ago this month, Kurtz noted, "Many bloggers are careful and thought-provoking, others partisan or mean-spirited." The question is: Why has the Post has made a conscious decision to champion mean-spirited bloggers like Malkin at the expense of the thought-provoking ones?
Sigh. It's because us careful and thought-provoking bloggers are a) boring, b) too obtruse and c) deficient in talk about anal sex, breast sizes, the desirability of a genocide of all darker skinned people or the best ways of lynching the members of the Supreme Court. So yes, I do know how to become mean-spirited and partisan (and the sweetheart of the Washington Post?), and I might even do that one day if I lose my dayjob.
Oops. Goddesses don't have dayjobs.