Just to show what a broad-minded guy I am, I’m going out of my way today to promote a column that skewers Bacon’s Rebellion. Peter Galuszka, a regular contributor to our Road to Ruin transportation news coverage, criticizes blogs generally, tossing a few barbs Bacon’s Rebellion’s way, in his opinion piece this week, “Plato’s Cave.”
Peter objects to the triumphalism that blogs display regarding the slow-motion demise of the “Mainstream Media.” His main point is undeniable: Traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television provide the news content that blogs feed off. Few blogs conduct much first-hand reporting. Without the Mainstream Media, bloggers would have little to comment upon.
The decline in journalistic coverage is especially marked overseas — foreign correspondents are being laid off in droves. That’s of particular concern to Peter, who ran the Moscow bureau for BusinessWeek during the transition between Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Americans are ignorant enough of foreign politics, economics and culture as it is, he argues, and the situation will likely get worse.
(Peter doesn’t care for xenophobia either, a tendency he sees in the reaction of many Virginians to illegal immigration and explores in a previous column, “Virginia Is for Gulags.” He also gets pieved when I use the term “Euro-weenies.” He probably won’t like it when I refer to him as a “Euroweeniephile.”)
If you’d like to see more left-of-center commentary in the Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine, give Peter some positive reinforcement in the comments section.