Blogs and bloggers have gotten a bad rap recently.

First there was that story in the New York Times about how bloggers are keeling over and dying. The culprit? The treadmill that is the 24-hour news cycle. (That prompted blogger Mom-101 to respond that she didn’t want to be found face down on her keyboard, an “escape” key stuck to her cheek.)

Then there was that piece in the Wall Street Journal about how Dooce.com blogger Heather Armstrong has to steel herself against the barrage of hate-mail she gets.

And then, as I was innocently listening to MPR last week to Os Guinness, a British scholar who wrote a book lamenting the loss of civility in American public life. I agreed with almost all of what he said, nodding to myself in my car on a commute from some assignment to another. Until he began railing against blogs. Blogs, he pronounced, are “not agents of civility.”

Well, I beg to differ.

Mr. Guinness should check out Cribsheet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Related Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.