Bill Maher vs. Web Logs

Erica Jackson has a very good response to Bill Maher’s recent attack on web loggers on his Politically Incorrect show. In case you haven’t followed this, Politically Incorrect auctioned off an appearance on the show and somebody put up $47,000 for the right to be on the show (which is about $46,999 too many).

Anyway, Maher used the guest’s appearance to rip on people who keep journals online. Here’s how Jackson sums up Maher’s message,

Much to my surprise, Maher focussed his vitriol on online journals. I was shocked someone who scorns the Internet (this isn’t the first time he’s belittled it) would even be aware OLJs exist. Others on the panel went on to say that people who are spending that time online, are missing out on the “real” world. (As if word-addicted people like myself would be Hollywood scenesters but for the Internet.) Further, Maher scoffed at panelist Bill O’Reilly’s assertion that OLJs were just an natural extension of the talk show/reality TV model (which for many, they clearly are).

Maher insisted they worked hard to be on TV, so why should idiots with web pages get so much attention. I defy him to learn all the technical aspects of TV production and not only not be paid handsomely for it, but pay for the privilege out of his own pocket.

Give me a break. One of the big knocks on web loggers is they’re obssessed with getting mentioned on each other’s web logs and whine about who discovered a link first and why won’t popular blog A link to me. Television invented this sort of incestuous nonsense.

There are really two main differences between the average web logger and Bill Maher — the average web logger is more interesting and they write their own material (I wouldn’t hold that last part against Maher if his material wasn’t so bad. In fact Maher is one of the few comedians I’ve seen who is actually less funny than Bob Saget.

If anything I think Jackson herself underestimates the value of online journals. Although there used to be a much wider audience for it, today the art of the memoir has all but disappeared. Book publishers today only want memoirs from extremely famous people, and unfortunately most of those books tend to be self-serving arguments in favor of some personal goal rather than honest autobiography.

About a decade a go, I had the opportunity to interview a man who had played a key role in the development of the university I was attending at the time. He had self-published several volumes of memoirs. Unless you attended this university during the 1940s or 1950s, this man is competely unkown, and yet he had fascinating stories of traveling in pre-war Europe and then returning back there as a soldier.

Another professor I never actually met self-published an autobiography describing his family’s harrowing flight out of Communist-controlled Poland at the end of World War II. Again, the way Maher measures success this person is a nobody.

If these two men had web logs I’m sure the things they would have to say would be of far more interest than Maher’s rather trite rehashing of current events.

Leave a Reply