Blogs vs MSM: An Unnecessarily Stark Dichotomy?

The political blogosphere is a very self-conscious entity. Like anything new and young (teenagers, students) observing the established old guard (parents, teachers), it constantly frets about its relevance and position vis a vis the so-called mainstream. This will of course change one day when it becomes the new standard. In the mean time, examples of the current gulf between the two approaches — staid old-school journalism versus the gauche and awkward blog-o-rama — abound. Returning to my earlier post linking to a story in the Globe and Mail, notice the overall cool detachment and uniformly diplomatic tone throughout Brown's article. While clearly critical of Mr. Harper, there's a palpable sense of reluctance on Brown's part to overtly name the Prime Minister's manipulative nature, even ending on a fairly positive note ("Next to an exploding cannon like Mr. Vellacott, Big Daddy Harper looks wise, temperate, compassionate — maybe even calm enough to deserve a majority") [Emphasis mine]. There are no such qualms in this piece from rabble.ca, an online Canadian 'zine for progressive politics, a much more web-savvy entity than the venerable Globe and Mail could ever be. The writer, Jack McAndrew, pulls no punches in his decimation of Harper's motives. Compare this:

When Mr. Harper says he is protecting loved ones from the evil and relentless media by not allowing media coverage of the body bags as they come back from Afghanistan, he is lying. The only people he is trying to protect are Stephen Harper and the politicians of the Conservative party — protecting them from a Canadian public which just might start asking tough questions about the reason Canadians are being killed fighting a nonsensical war launched by his good buddy Mr. Bush.

And when Mr. Harper desecrates the memory of those Canadians who are killed and dismembered on behalf of Mr. Bush in the rough and rocky terrain of Afghanistan, he does so only so that we are not exposed to visible reminders of this feckless national adventure.

Indeed, there is only one reason for every action and every lie — the election of a majority Conservative government next spring.

With the much milder and more subtle:

To judge from his first four months in office, Mr. Harper is running the most hands-on, centrally controlled federal government in living memory, a government so Harper-centric and so micro-managed by the Prime Minister's Office it feels literally patriarchal. If Big Daddy Harper is a control freak — and no one denies it, even if they won't speak for attribution — he is a control freak on purpose, in order to come across as a firm and fatherly leader, one prime ministerial enough to deserve a majority in the next election.

Consider the evidence:

Last month, to avoid bad press on an issue he has tied firmly to the Conservative brand, Mr. Harper banned the media from filming the return of the bodies of four Canadian soldiers who died last month in Afghanistan.

Although the message of both pieces is very similar, the latter is far less accusatory, less inflammatory. In our current age of dualism, in which we apparently have to constantly choose between polarities, I suppose it's clear that we will have a preference for one form of polemic over another, but after reading both pieces carefully -- and incidentally agreeing strongly with the warnings they both espouse -- I don't feel the need to indicate a preference. I'm glad that there's the blogosphere, this clamouring unruly marketplace of ideas and humanity... but I'm also grateful for the arms-length detachment of our older media, the kindly professor to the former's wild-eyed student activist. They are both necessary. One caveat, though: we must be watchful that the benevolent old prof doesn't follow the example of his colleagues to the south and end up marching lockstep alongside the very institutions he is there to critique (if like me you don't have a subscription, that Salon link is definitely worth the relatively minor hassle of an ad-clickthrough, incidentally).