the cowardly lioness

Dan Gillmor reports on some interesting comments from Tina Brown, the powerful (ex?) magazine editor, on the role of bloggers. This ain't nice folks. It is not necessary to bandy terms like Stasi around - stopping just short of KGB or Gestapo, is she? I thought they were all pretty much the same in my versions of history.

I don't think I'll ever get used to female journos who say things like this about other women - this pap is directed at Condoleeza Rice, whose politics I oppose, but whose rise I am impressed by in my misguided li'l hippy heart
(okay, I know, I'm discriminating against powerful white women here ):

Condi seems to have shed gender, shed race, shed the need for any visible emotional life. Her hobbies -- ice skating, chamber music -- are intellectually pristine and demurely glamorous. As national security adviser in the Church Lady White House, she was the Policy Nun. As secretary of state and queen of Foggy Bottom, she shows signs of becoming the Bushies' Emma Peel.

I take exception to this nonsense here- it really is a lightweight piece ( Washington Post) with an aim to skewering bloggers on the pointy end of a media backlash:

We are in the Eggshell Era, in which everyone has to tiptoe around because there's a world of busybodies out there who are being paid to catch you out -- and a public that is slowly being trained to accept a culture of finks.

Slowly? Who the hell is she talking to here? Not the public, that's for sure. Like the print and broadcast media haven't been doing this for at least fifty years already? QUE??

And the last para is too silly really. If Ms. Brown doesn't want people to talk about her, but wants the freedom to print anything she feels like, then surely she is 'shedding' a few fundamentals herself.