Obama on Newspapers vs. Blogosphere & My Response

In a recent interview with newspaper editors, President Obama called himself a "big newspaper junkie" and said the survival of newspapers is "critical to the health of our democracy."

A key Obama quote: "I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding."

Despite the "serious fact-checking" that supposedly goes on at the N.Y. Times frontpage or Washington Post editorial page, both were publishing cartoonish distortions of reality in the run-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq. That is, they were offering a lot of shouting across the void on one of the most important foreign policy controversies in years .

Despite the blogosphere's faults properly alluded to by our newspaper reader-in-chief, I respectfully respond to him by paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson and his preference for "newspapers without a government" over "a government without newspapers."

If forced to choose, I must admit to preferring "the Internet without newspapers" over "newspapers without the Internet."