Andrew Sullivan has probably done more than anyone else in contemporary America to lend credence to the old so-con charge that even gay men who seem sober and worldly on the surface are emotional wrecks underneath. Ever since President Bush didn’t snap to on same-sex marriage, Sullivan’s made a habit of inflating his every petulant little emotional reaction into a matter of earth-shaking significance, as exemplified by his utterly bizarre public obsession with whether Sarah Palin is actually Trig’s mother. At this point, Sullivan’s blog is where you go to see just how classless, graceless, and common a DC status-seeker can actually be.

It is, therefore, pretty comical to see Jonathan Rauch, ensconced for the time being as a guest poster at the Daily Dish, contrast Sullivan’s online oeuvre favorably with the ephemera emitted by most other bloggers (via the admirably restrained Megan McArdle):

I submit that the whining of traditional journalists (you know, the kind of people who punched their tickets on newspaper police beats where they learned quaint notions of fairness and accuracy and keeping one’s opinions out of it and all that) is nothing compared to the self-congratulatory smugness of internet culture, which tells us at least five times before breakfast that it is the Great New Thing.

It isn’t. For people who want to read and think, which is still a lot of people, the worldwide web is an incorrigibly hostile environment. Thank goodness, it is already in the process of being displaced by the far more reader-friendly world of apps, which is hospitable to quality writing and focused reading, as opposed to knee-jerk opinionating and attention-deficit-disordered skimming. The blogging format, I believe, was an outgrowth of a particular technological moment, specifically the gap between the decline of paper and the rise of HTML5. Its heyday is over.

There are a few great bloggers out there. Andrew Sullivan is one of them. But they’re depressingly rare.

Interesting. Sullivan can’t even get the title of the classic Dead or Alive song right—that’s “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record),” sweetie—so I assume it’s not finicking accuracy from which his Great Blogger-ness is presumed to spring. (It’s probably not his lack of self-congratulatory smugness, either, given that Sullivan seems to think that God came to him in a gay bar—yes way!—and designated him Prophet of the Benign Hidden World therein.)

Also interesting is the locution “reader-friendly,” because what surrounds it indicates that Rauch is thinking like a writer rather than like a reader. Most of us general readers understand that books, journals, popular magazines, and blogs provide different depths of coverage for any given topic, and we weight what we read accordingly. It really isn’t all that hard to distinguish between a monograph with fifty pages of endnotes and a quickie blog item with two links. Or even a longer blog item with a boatload of links. I suspect that’s the reason that bloggers who want to present long, worked-out arguments tend to write actual books for the purpose.

McArdle’s commenters focus mostly on how wrong Rauch is to equate blog posts with reporting, or to say that something that won’t be read decades from now hasn’t served a useful purpose, or to hold up conventional journalists as models of accuracy and impartiality. All good points, but I think there’s another to be made.

Here’s the thing: a lot of journalists seem to assume that a grounding in j-school ethics curricula and vaguely defined “critical-thinking” skills can make up for not actually being deeply informed about what the hell they’re writing about. It drives us readers bananas. Over my eleven years in Tokyo, I participated in more conversations than I can count with other foreigners about what idiocies our home-country media routinely peddled about East Asia. Ditto the test-prep field, in which I worked for a decade. Keen observation skills, which most professional journalists undoubtedly have, just aren’t always a substitute for living in a region or working in an industry as a long-term, fully invested participant. In such situations, the blogosphere has been a very good corrective. Readers can go to blogs to see articles scrutinized and pulled apart (“focused reading,” we might call it) by actual specialists in the topic in question, and the result is an increase in both real knowledge and healthy skepticism. Most of us started bookmarking blogs precisely because we wanted to “read and think” beyond what we were already getting from standard-issue news and academic outlets.

I’m using the term standard-issue mindedly. I swear I would be retired to Antibes by now if I had just one red cent for every article by a Real Journalist that started like this:

Molly sits at the teak table, its top polished to a mirror shine, in her family’s kitchen. Each week Jeff comes to their gated community in a leafy, exclusive Long Island town to tutor her in SAT math. Mom and Dad met as undergrads at Tufts, but their dream for Molly is a significant step up: she’s aiming for Yale, and they’re betting $350 an hour that Jeff can get her there. Jeff himself went to Williams, and he’s one of a growing number of graduates of hyper-competitive colleges who have discovered that they can make as much money as their former classmates in corporate America by entering the burgeoning college-coaching sector blah blah blah.

And compared to Japan, the test-prep industry gets off easy. Give me the vitality of incorrigible hostility any day of the week over that insufferable, ostentatiously contemplative, I-am-alive-to-the-Zen-like-vibrations-of-all-things-Yamato tone that no Western reporter can apparently avoid when writing about Japan. And the paradoxes—every damned thing reported about Japan has to come down to some kind of paradox. Journalists reporting on Japan will apparently accept anything done by four people in Tokyo as a trend. They make the staff of the NYT Style Section look cautious.

This is starting to sound like the usual screed against the big, bad MSM, but that’s not where I’m going, exactly. Most reporters work hard and generate good prose, and it’s only fair to acknowledge that the grunt work they do is the basis for a great deal of blog commentary. Fine. But plenty of reporters, commentators, and editors give every indication of not knowing what they don’t know. Maybe it’s not their fault, but it means that what they produce often doesn’t stand alone as useful information about the topic at hand. Good blogs supplement it, which Rauch might know if he spent less time reading his man Andrew Sullivan.

Instapundit observes that the LAT‘s Michael Hiltzik is “really upset” that BMW is laying off the unionized teamsters it employs directly at one of its California warehouses and going to let a contracting company handle staffing from here one. Michael Hiltzik grew up here in New York and went to Colgate, but it’s possible that he’s from a working-class rather than comfy-bourgeois family background. He sure as hell doesn’t sound like it, though. His column displays the ignorance of someone who never spends time with people who work with their hands except cabbies, waitresses, and interview subjects:

As of Aug. 31, the plant [will] be outsourced to an unidentified third-party logistics company and all but three of its 71 employees laid off.

The union contract will be terminated. Some of the employees might be offered jobs with the new operator, but there are no guarantees. And no one expects the new bosses will match the existing $25 hourly scale or the health benefits provided now.

…

Every working American should be dismayed by — and afraid of — what BMW is doing.

These employees exemplified the best qualities of the American worker. They devoted their working lives to BMW, at a time when it was building and solidifying its U.S. beachhead. Their wages, with benefits, paid for a reasonable middle-class lifestyle if they managed it carefully. Throw in the job security they were encouraged to expect, and they had the confidence to make sacrifices and investments that contributed to the economy for the long term, like college education for the kids, an addition on the house, a new baby. Then one day they were handed a mass pink slip, effective in a matter of weeks.

My father worked for Bethlehem Steel when I was growing up, and he spent much time in my teenage years laid off. There are few more effective ways to get at me emotionally than to tell me about some laboring man who’s suddenly out of a job and feeling unwanted by the labor market. My father was called back to the Steel my senior year of high school and is still working for its most recent owner, so things worked out for my parents, but there were some real nail-biter years in there.

My parents would probably have loved to own a detached house, with the possibility of putting an addition on or a pool in. But my brother and I grew up in a tiny two-bedroom rowhouse that we rented. My father made a little extra money by being the landlady’s de facto super, doing odd jobs as needed. My mother worked part-time in the cafeterias in our school district once my brother started first grade. And while my financial aid package from Penn was generous enough to allow me to go, my parents sat down with me my senior year of high school and said, “Look, kid, you may be working your way through college depending on how things go.”

So I’m kind of lost when Hiltzik patronizingly bleats about the “reasonable middle-class lifestyle” (reasonable to whom, kemosabe?) that these people all assumed they could expect in perpetuity and have now lost. The economy has sucked for three years. Didn’t anyone stop to think about what might happen if BMW’s fortunes turned sour, or, as is happening, it decided to reorganize in order to stay financially healthy? Hiltzik talks in passive voice about “the job security they were encouraged to expect,” but you kind of have to wonder whether BMW was leading them on or the teamsters’ union just gave them to understand that it would always find a way to strong-arm the company into striking a deal to their advantage.

Kim du Toit wrote into Instapundit with some harsher words for Hiltzik’s profilees:

By Hiltzik’s own admission, the plain fact of the matter is that these BMW union workers were getting middle-class salaries for doing piecework. Amid all the “woe is us” stories, one attitude shines through: the unionized workforce expected a sinecure for their “loyalty” and are now devastated by finding out what we non-union workers have always known: employment is not guaranteed, and if you continue to ask for more money than the job is worth, you will eventually lose your job.

I don’t know that sinecure is the word I’d choose, but I wouldn’t say it’s not apposite. The people Hiltzik describes probably did work hard. But having grown up with a USW father, I heard plenty of stories of coworkers who wanted to punch in, do exactly what they were told, punch out and forget about work. (I also heard plenty of stories about coworkers who were just plain lazy but were protected by the union, but for now let’s just assume that Hiltzik’s fantasy obtains and everyone involved here pulls his or her weight.) There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but it means that decisions about the future of the company will be made while you’re not paying attention by people who care.

And I can understand where Kim’s pissy tone comes from, given Hiltzik’s insufferable pious-lefty tone:

The Ontario union, Teamsters Local 495, got Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Reps. Joe Baca (D-Rialto) and Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) to write painfully polite letters to Jim O’Donnell, chairman of BMW North America, asking him to reconsider. When I say that’s the least they could do, I’m talking literally — it’s the very least. How about hauling him before a televised hearing and having him balance out a $3.6-billion taxpayer loan with the firing of 70 American workers? The company surely wouldn’t characterize its federal loan as charity, but neither is maintaining its parts distribution workers on a living wage.

It’s fashionable to observe today that the loyalty the BMW workers gave their employer was naive; complain to manufacturing CEOs about their remorseless hollowing out of middle-class livelihoods to maintain payouts to shareholders, and the answer you get is that this is merely the way of our hyper-competitive modern world. Nothing personal; it’s the tyranny of the marketplace.

Yeah, I have no doubt that top management at BMW would call it “the tyranny of the marketplace”—not to acknowledge reality, but to disguise it in order to avoid bad PR. As Hiltzik himself implicitly acknowledges in the previous paragraphs, BMW and the Fed are part of the same big-government/big-business club of glad-handing and special deals for insiders, which circumvents the market forces that would crush a company like BMW if it couldn’t solve its own financial problems without an infusion of DC cash.

And while we’re on the subject of diction: I’m not sure loyalty in this case means what Hiltzik wants it to mean. Some of the workers at the Ontario plant probably genuinely love what they do and love doing it for BMW. But dollars to doughnuts, others are just too complacent to think about changing jobs, especially if the employment market sucks and they know they’re being paid at the top end of the wage range for what they’re doing. That’s certainly rational on their part, but that doesn’t mean it’s rational not to plan for what might happen if the gravy train ever stops. When contracts expire, sometimes they’re not renewed. To paraphrase Kim, just because you’re good at what you do, that doesn’t mean the union isn’t getting you more money to do it than keeping you on is worth in the current economy. Note that I’m not just talking about what the workers themselves are paid. Hiltzik weirdly writes as if that were the only cost associated with them, but of course it’s not. Negotiations with the union and compliance with the vagaries of the NLRB (mentioned by Instapundit) and assorted regulations have to be factored in.

My point isn’t that Hiltzik has his angels and devils reversed. Maybe BMW really is being venal toward workers who poured themselves into building the company from their own small part of it. But you can’t simply start the narrative in the present and leave it to be assumed that keeping things as they used to be is a viable alternative. Someone with actual experience of working-class life, I can’t help thinking, would have asked a lot more about the past than comes out in Hiltzik’s soft-focus flashbacks.

Congratulations to my friend Sarah Hoyt, whose Darkship Thieves has won the 2011 Prometheus Best Novel Award. Very good news!