Wow, so in the past couple of days Metafilter has picked up on the Fox News recap; Anil Dash and the Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn have mentioned it, too.
Just to clarify: I don’t think the Fox Chicago story was awful. I didn’t watch the segment with horror; mostly I was happy that my quotes made sense and that I didn’t look too puffy and mealymouthed speaking them. Before the interview I’d tried to come up with an articulate answer for the question “What is a blog?” because I suspected it would be one of the first things they’d ask. I was right, except the question was “What is a blogger?” which is slightly more roundabout, unless you happen to think that bloggers are a curious species, and I suppose we are. (But hey, so are American Idol fans, and there was way better coverage of their cultural phenomenon on the newscast that night.)
No, the story wasn’t terrible: it was just…typical. It’s true I have a pet peeve about human-interest news coverage of weblogs, and while I felt the segment could have been far worse, it still had a lot of textbook examples of the things that annoy me, and I couldn’t resist pointing them out. Here, thanks to a Metafilter contributor, is another TV news story with perhaps an even goofier introduction. My God.
