Meet The New Cokie
by digby
I got in a lot of trouble a few weeks ago for being disrespectful toward Ana Marie Cox. I have no intention of being disrespectful now. I think it’s just terrific that she’s become a full fledged member of the mainstream media and is covering bloggers as if they are pod people from mars. It’s the smart career move. Still, it’s quite a transition since for several years she represented the liberal blogosphere on countless blogging panels and media appearances. It’s a testament to her faking skills that she could convincingly be a blogging pioneer one minute and a befuddled mainstream journalist the next. It’s trailblazing, actually.
This article, which has been promised as the first of an exciting series on the YKOS convention is not illuminating in any way. It could have been written by Adam Nagourney. In fact, Adam Nagourney wrote the first draft.
Cox, being unfamiliar with flamethrowing blogging as she is, appears to be shocked to hear something like this:
One journalist presses some workshop attendees on the apparent disconnect between the online bomb- throwers and the chatty, eager conference goers. A woman explains that one would never attack someone in person the way you can online: “It’s the difference between bombing someone from 50,000 feet and sticking a bayonet between their eyes.” And most people, she observes, can’t deal with sticking a bayonet between the eyes. “Unless you’re really psychopathic.”
As a mainstream journalist now, it would imappropriate for her to offer any insights into the hyperbolic nature of blogging, despite her own contribution to the genre. That would be wrong. Instead, she just lets it hang out there as an example of the way the bloodthirsty left blogosphere thinks, even referring to the attendees sarcastically as “cordial” (and drunk) in the next paragraph. TIME must have been pleased.
TBOGG reports that Instapundit was very pleased when Cox sent him this private email which he posted on his blog:
“Bonus material: I saw Joe Wilson get not one but two standing ovations today; he was also called ‘a true American hero.’ People waited in line for his autograph. I’m going to begin drinking now.”
Can a Regnery special be far in the future? That’s the predictable move for her.
In the meantime, she throws her lot in with her new MSM pals explicitly when she writes:
A gaggle of mainstream media reporters in the back grows nervous. “Are you worried they’re going to blog us?” I ask someone. He replies, “I’m worried they’re going to lynch us.”
“Are you worried they’re going to blog us?”
I’m not sure what that means. I can only assume it bears some relationship to assfucking — Anna Marie’s special contribution to blogospheric discourse. Perhaps she’ll write about how one can parlay a blog about anal sex into a gig at the kewl kidz table in the next installment. It stands to reason that it’s that kind of “insider” insights for which TIME magazine signed her for this gig. If they wanted Cokie Roberts they would have hired Cokie Roberts.
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