Amen.

I'm not sure I buy your line on the mainstream media here -- there have been articles on the tsunami relief every couple of days in the NYT, and not much less frequently on cnn.com. Certainly the recent presidential visits were well-covered, for example.

And as for the blogs, well, what exactly do you want the blogosphere to be saying about this? There's not much to be argued about at this point, is there? So there's not much role for the standard kind of armchair-punditizing that is the blogger's mainstay. And in terms of people blogging their expertise, well, it seems to me that none of the main bloggers have any particularly relevant expertise to be sharing with us about how relief efforts ought to go. I guess there could be more linking to mainstream media pieces on it, but I think most bloggers assume their readership is already reading/viewing that media, and only points to the media when they want to make a point about that media.

Or, to put it all another way: why should it matter that the blogosphere has not cared to put up a big poof of hot air over continued tsunami relief efforts? How would things be better for anyone anywhere if all these folks had indeed put up some little posts on it?

There's a certain line of thought here, that I've seen implicit in other arguments (some of the recent exchange here on Larry Summers, for example), where people want to draw inferences about the values of bloggers from premises about what the bloggers have spent their time blogging. But there's just very few good inferences to be made of that form. There are so many other factors that go into someone's decision to blog -- and engaging in a debate of some sort can be a very large factor here -- that there's just pretty much no implication at all to be drawn from someone's not having blogged something.

(I do think, however, that something like this line of thought can be relevantly applied against some sectors of the mainstream media, since they -- but not bloggers -- have slogans like "All the News that's Fit to Print".)

I disagree. The mainstream media have at least been providing updates, as you mention (although I think that most cameras left with the Lincoln), but there's been little discussion about the recent increase in the Bush administration's aid to the tsuanmi victims, compared to the amount originally given.

But I don't see the connections to the Summers thing at all. Bloggers were upset when there was a manufactured controversy for them to posture about; now they are not upset, indeed silent, when there is no controversy. One might conclude that bloggers, as a community, have only two settings: Hysterical and apathetic. That criticism begins to sound a lot like the standard description of, say, cable news.

Further, NYT, CNN, and WSJ (threw that in for good measure) have been providing mainly case-by-case updates on this and that part of the story. And in many instances, it appears the news outlets only covered tsuanmi-related news because it involved Clinton and Bush Sr. In few cases (none I saw within the first few pages of search results) was there the kind of systematic investigation and description of the recovery efforts we'd expect.

The bigger story, of course, is that the media is bad at covering ongoing, significant and subtle stories. This is not news. But many important facts which are not novel bear repeating.

But then, Paul, the claim you're really willing to defend is less the truly disturbing:
--No one is covering the tsunami recovery--
and more the rather less uncomfortable (to all non-Pauls, anyway):
--No one is covering the tsunami recovery is quite the way Paul would like them to--

And keep in mind that there's been a lot of serious international stuff in the news lately: Iraq (of course), Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, North Korea, Russia... should any of these been covered less, in order to report more on the tsunami recovery? We do have a limited amount of international bandwidth, it's true, but the tone of your post was as if we were ignoring the world altogether, so as to gaze at the navel of social security.

(And what's so wrong with our spending lots of time of social security? The policy of it is important enough, as our largest federal program, but the politics of it are pretty important, too -- the outcome of this battle will profoundly shape the dynamics of the federal government at least through the midterms, and probably ramify to the end of the presidential term. And it's a painfully complicated & nuanced topic. If anything, I wish there were more nonblog media coverage of the real particulars of the debate.)

I don't think I was clear enough with what I meant, in invoking Summers. It would have been clearer, maybe, if I had invoked it as Summers-and-Churchill, and all the right-wing bloggers who have wanted to cast some vague sort of aspersion on liberal bloggers and/or academia for what they perceive as disparate amounts of concern -- as if somehow your average academic disagreed with Churchill's statements less than they do with Summers'. My point was that you can't in general read such things off of what does or doesn't show up in the blogs. My further point is that blogs on the whole do the job that they can do pretty well, and the mistake is to ask them to do more than that job. I suppose I should have taken your pokes at the blogosphere as more aimed at blogospheric triumphalists; but you wrote it as a critque of blogging itself, and not of its overzealous promoters.

I absolutely agree with you on what you just called the bigger story, and it would be nice if people had more of an appetite for such things. (I wonder whether the newsweeklies do a better job of providing it? I don't read Time or USN&WR or any of those, so I just don't know.) But that doesn't really justify the overly hand-wringing tone of the initial post.

Phil, I admit to being both disappointed and irritated with you. Disappointed, because one or the other of us is consistently at odds with the other; irritated, because as someone who inhabits the comment boards, your criticisms (after, what, two or three years?) start to come across as hectoring.

I took a deliberately systematic view of the tsunami's coverage, not blaming Glenn or Duncan or Markos or Sully, or the Times or the Journal for that matter, but a decently large pilot sample (including, obviously, Google News). Given that, in my view, the coverage so far has been sporadic, unfocused, and rather unenlightening overall--yes, then my complaint is that people aren't covering this story as I want them to call it.

But considering that this story has attracted virtually no mainstream American or (major) bloggish comment in the past six weeks commensurate with its scale, whereas Social Security has attracted far more (I stopped reading TPM because of its all-OASDI all-the-time format), I think it's fair to point out the contrasts.

"I suppose I should have taken your pokes at the blogosphere as more aimed at blogospheric triumphalists; but you wrote it as a critque of blogging itself, and not of its overzealous promoters."

You're drawing a distinction here that doesn't fully make sense to me. Blogging triumphalists don't seek to explain the behavior of blogging triumphalists; they seek to explain blogging. Therefore, any critique of the triumphalists will have to counter their universalist claims. (And I frankly don't see how you could have read the two paragraphs about blogs as anything but a refutation of bloggish triumphalism.)

In any event, I would contend that the general tenor of bloggish coverage of all complicated, subtle, long-term phenomena tends to be at least as shallow, on average, as that of the Old Media. I chose one particular event because the Post article suggested it to me. I could have written a very similar post discussing the ahistoricality of blog discussions of, say, Middle Eastern changes or East Asian security policy. I know that I have pointed out the lacunae involved in discussions of India's rise to power, among many other discussions of similar themes.

In sum, then, I don't see a responsibility to spoon-feed my readers with what would amount to highly repetitive theoretical justifications for each post when I publish each essay. I presume my readers are capable of doing elementary textual analysis, and that readers who have read my rather copious output for the past few years are familiar with the broad themes that inform my work. Perhaps I should rethink my expectations.