Ed Driscoll and Glenn Reynolds have done one of the back-and-forth link routines we often see on the topic of blog readership.
In particular, they are talking about the number of blogs passing a couple of numerical milestones. The comparison of numbers goes on to compare those numbers to the readership of mainstream newspapers, and viewership of the news networks. One comparison caught my eye:
CNN’s typically daily viewership is only about 450,000 viewers. (The Fox News Channel, the cable news ratings leader, gets an average of 799,000 viewers during their broadcasting day.)
Somehow those numbers seem very low, but I’m sure there is some mathematics to back them up somewhere.
My concern is that there are far too many people in the blogosphere patting themselves on the back. The blogosphere is dynamic, and that is what makes it different from those other outlets. Yet it is a short step from that to muddled thought.
What form could the blogosphere eventually take? When you rest on your laurels you end up with what we see in Hollywood and newsrooms. Where are the Jimmy Stewarts and Clark Gables who could get in uniform to support the country? These are the folks who deride Pat Tillman–don’t look for any there. How about Newspapers? Maureen Dowd is still employed at The New York Times, is she not? And television gives us arrogance in the form of Dan Rather and Bill O’Reilly. All are folks who believe they have the truth, and you must agree with them or you are somehow defective in cognitive ability.
That is not something they set out to become. They began by having a vision of providing entertainment, or explaining events with clarity so that their viewers and readers didn’t have to sift through the garbage to draw valid conclusions. But they became the gatekeepers for what was and wasn’t garbage, probably without ever realizing it.
Beware success. It can drive you to believe you alone have all the answers. One of the things I loved about the military was the ethos that didn’t allow this to happen very often. For all the complaints being aired about the National Guard specialist asking Rumsfeld about armor, there is some history that keeps this kind of dialog alive there. Military bosses are not above reproach, and know it. Awards are given, and just as quickly forgotten. Past performance is not the standard of evaluation–potential is. Receive a Navy Cross, and you’re soon just another sailor or Marine. Win an Oscar, and your future is established for a lifetime.
The Weblog Awards, conceived as a way to recognize folks who have provided excellent content and thought while exposing some to blogs they’ve not seen before have potential for becoming Oscaresque if we aren’t careful. Today is the last day of voting, and there will be a huge push from some bloggers for your vote. Remember, we shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back. We need to follow the path of military professional rather than that of our betters in Hollywood.