Why would bloggers want to be journalists?

Eric Engberg is the latest journo to take a shot at bloggers by setting up the Straw Man argument that bloggers claim to be replacements for journalism. He doesn't get it. I've never seen any blogger claim that. What people like Engberg don't get, or can't gainsay, is that mainstream journalism has become so homogenized and predictable that the whole point of the First Amendment was not being served, until the emergence of right wing talk radio and blogs. It's significant that the new prominence of bloggers has not come from The Daily Kos or Talking Points Memo or any newspaper website. We already had plenty of access to liberal opinions. The market for conservative and libertarian views was the real story. It's as though MSM doesn't even want to acknowledge that the audience for Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Instapundit and Power Line exist. Well, they do, and they made their presence felt, along with many "9/11 liberals" who realized that our media had failed to warn us of the threat of terrorism and didn't care for the reflexive "blame America" spin after the fall of the WTC.

I guess we should be grateful for the fact that journalists have been "speaking out," because it has demonstrated how cocooned old media have become, confirming years and years of complaints from conservatives. The minute there were alternatives, the unserved market for conservative opinion revealed itself with shocking speed. And not even Jame Carville has been is as much denial as the liberal media elite.

I quit listening to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly because they have become celebritized. Americans, particularly conservatives, have highly developed BS detectors, and they don't like elitism any more in conservative pundits than they do in liberal ones.