"(T)he best of the blogs do a better job than the best of the mainstream media"

So says Hugh Hewitt while conducting an interview with Joseph Rago, the Wall Street Journal assistant editorial features editor who said blogs were "written by fools to be read by imbeciles." (Via Ann Althouse)

Hewitt does an excellent job of skewering Rago, hoisting him on his own petard that journalists do a better job covering stories than bloggers because, well, they're journalists.

Rago suffers from that self-importance journalists are loathed for (I know because I was one). Rago argues that most blogs are awful and that the MSM (a term he hates) does a better job of covering events.

It's understandable that the 23-year-old Rago would be defending his chosen livelihood so fiercely. With the precipitous drop in readership of newspapers, most of the lifers at the WSJ are probably calculating what they can get if they retire now.

The problem confronting Rago, and all print journalists, is that, while blogs aren't necessarily written by journalists and go through four editors who nitpick for style and comma errors, many of them are written by people who are experts in a given area, be that area law or military affairs (including people actually on the ground in Iraq and not hiding out in the green zone), or medicine. In fact, there are so many blogs out there that individual readers can, in a sense, become their own reporters, gleaning facts and opinions from a variety of sources.

There are numerous constraints on print journalists that don't happen in the blogosphere. Blogs aren't constrained by space limitations, nor are they beholden to advertisers who might yank all those car ads if you run a piece on how consumers can get a better deal on their car. Bloggers also don't have to stick with one "beat" day after day, trying to find a new angle to a story they might tell annually (like about the state fair). And bloggers don't have to get their stories approved by editors who might not like them (either the reporter or the story).

Are there awful blogs? Sure. Most blogs are personal blabberings created to satisfy the egos of the creator, and those blogs may last a few days, weeks, or months. But most of the blogs that follow the news, that do interviews, that cover events, are at least as good as anything you can read in a newspaper.

Part of the reason bloggers are outperforming print journalists is that journalists have done such a crappy job with major stories like Iraq or politics that readers don't trust them. At least with bloggers, you know up front what their biases are. They aren't afraid to wave the flag or burn the flag (metaphorically speaking). Readers are much more forgiving of someone who is honest, even if they don't write real pretty every day.

Cross-posted at Common Sense Political Thought.

UPDATE: Hot Air has responses from WSJ readers.