Back in May of 2009 I had a nice pleasant little dream. I was going to start a professional blog. After all, I had a looot of good things to say. I am smart. I have a constant stream of ideas. And I was so full of my own sense of importance that I thought I deserved to be heard (I may still be of this opinion, but that is beside the point). I glorified blogging as the next stage of journalism, one where people can get news in a concise fashion quickly, that has been cross-checked and confirmed by the masses in solid Web 2.0 fashion, hyperlinked for sources, and–so I thought–balanced by the general mass of information available. Riiight.

I started writing. I wrote some good stuff. My What Happened to Nuclear Power post shows up second in google if you type in that question and is a much more informed article than the first one that shows up.  It still gets maybe 10 views a day, with no promotion. But that was only one article and probably my best. It utilized an immense amount of information, assimilating a long course of study into a reasonably concise article. But most of the other stuff I put up there in my pretty much daily posting was all mostly a lot of bullshit. I mean, I’d just see something in the news or in something I was reading, have a thought, and write it up. Never mind whether I understood it or whether I really knew what was going on. Never mind depth. Never mind content. It just had to be interesting and well phrased. In less than a month I was getting about 100 views per day. I mean, not much. But I think I could’ve maybe made something of it. Maybe. I definitely made it out to be a big deal. I planned it forever, spent a week getting the format just write (even learning some XML and CSS), and talked everyone’s ear off about how important it was.

But then I realized something. I didn’t really know what I was talking about. If I did it was only a superficial knowledge briefly gained then I’d move on. This is my complaint against journalism in general–it is a superficial understanding that allows us a peak and then we move on.  Sure this may be necessary–there is too much info out there for us all to be experts–but I found out it is not something I want to be.

Then there is the rhetorical aspects of journalism, but most especially blogging.  1/3 of my interests are in rhetorical theory (and I will most likely get a Ph.D in Communications…) so this is kind of a big deal. The way that we say things, especially in our sources of news, does an immense amount to define our outlook on the world, ourselves, and our society.  Need I say it? Journalism has become a sensationalist business. Blogging? Eh…I’ll let Jon Stewart take it from here:

Oh Jon Stewart…your wisdom is so immense. Btw, that clip will only be available for some 30 days because thats how Hulu does it. If its gone, just know its about how bloggers use words like “eviscerate” and “destroyed” to speak about every day happenings, exaggerating and overdramatizing every day interactions to add to their sensational feel. Its like the whole news/blogosphere has become the National Inquirer, finding aliens where there was only a low flying helicopter.

Jon Stewart himself is a great comparison point. You know he does his research and he knows his stuff. He may be a comedian but you know where the bias is and its all in good humor. After watching O’Reily you get this impending sense of dread about the world. After watching Stewart…you just get a sense of the absurdity of our lives and (more than anything) the depiction of it in our news organizations. Yet for some reason people seem to be saying that its horrible to use Stewart as a news source and Stewart must also go along with that sentiment. According to O’Reilly, everyone who takes Stewart seriously are “extreme liberals” or..what was it…”twenty-something stoners” I believe it was. Hmph. I guess that must be me.

Now the Onion or even Colbert Report I can understand. They sustain personas that make it impossible to tell news from reality. Stewart? He does a great job of separating it out. And its not like I’d stop there on the news. Stewart is just a nice 30 min highlight of the news just like the 6:00 nightly news (which really only has 20 min worth of news somehow spread over an hour). If I’m interested in knowing more about whats going on, then I google search it. Maybe get a blog or two …I mean find a few articles or videos on a couple of the major news networks and get a better feel for whats going on. Otherwise, whats wrong with Stewart? Surely an explicit joke is far better than the implicit joke that is most of the rest of the media.

So look at that, three rants in one blog post.

Speaking of which…why then am I still blogging right now? Easy. This is for me. Yay, you read it. Cool. Comment if you want, that’s great. But I didn’t write it for you, although I do appreciate it when my friends take a look at my blog. Its just my thoughts. Yep.