Pat Nolan's Comparative Journalism Hour

Welcome to Divine Perspective’s Sunday news comparison.

These weekly posts intend to subjectively conflate news sources from around the world and across the spectra in order to bring you an ill-informed media analysis of an event from the preceding week. Well, they will do that every week but this one. Today I am looking at inaugural blog posts.

While I’m not introducing this blog—Josh did it here—I am introducing my contribution to this blog. It’s difficult for any number of reasons. Part of me wants to put humility forward and avoid writing about writing (there’s an adage out there). When I didn’t know how to kick it off, I started looking to see what others did. I was hoping to find a correlation between the style or etiquette on the one hand, and the content on the other.

Hot Air, Michelle Malkin’s conservative blogomerate, kicks off with two structural but manifesto-declaring posts that both identify their alignment to the conservative cause and explain to readers how the site will function. It’s a very human, social approach, but also unapologetically rhetorical. The unqualified pronouncement is reminiscent of the right’s pop-journalism. Not sure it would stand up over at the National Review.

Think Progress, blog of the leftist Center for American Progress, preferred the professional 0-60, throw the nonswimmer into the pool approach. There’s no green light, no announcement. One minute there’s nothing but a browser’s “Page Not Found,” and the next the blog has explained why Bush should certainly close Guantanamo. Its use of argument form might be elitist. Its lack of introduction might be anti-social.

Let’s jump scale and amplify the tone of these two etiquette-content matchups to the national level. The right is dumb, but admirable for taking social issues so personally. The left is smart, but lacks the intuitive social skill-set that leadership mandates. Let me offer an alternative.  

Hu Shuli, Beijing’s mainstream but independent news-teller extraordinaire, has her cake and eats it. Her clever move was to take the Think Progress quick start (avoiding the writing about writing thing), but leverage that ignorance of social protocol against her choice of content: how to surf the web. This kind of thing is not her specialty (she’s a wonk), but it serves as a nod to the above conundrum.

My implications aside, there is no connection between your political orientation or your native country’s freedoms of expression and your style of inaugural posting. Inaugural blog posts are not very consequential—expect me on the Greek exit next week—but the points are that creative solutions exist, that news is entertainment, that self-deprecation can be an unfortunate necessity.

--By Pat Nolan