Sounds about right.

I've been critical (oh, pardon the pun) of Josh Marshall on at least one occasion, so it's only fair that I note that I would have made roughly the same reply to a criticism made by one of his readers. Said critique was the standard You Haven't Written About This So I'm Going To Be Offended Now line that every blogger has had tossed at him or her; Marshall's reply is quite good. A snippet:

Perhaps I simply have nothing to add. The online world has lots of vociferous me-too-ism, going on record saying in fist-clenched tones things I think we all know we all feel. That's fine; I just don't like doing that.

As I've said, I've been there. Nobody can cover everything, all the time; for that matter, there's a couple things that I could be harping on, but don't, because doing so with bore me. Finite time, finite resources, finite outside/inside interest and this isn't a publication of record, either.

Comments

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Maybe so, maybe not. He is a professional who has quite a bit more time to write than most of us. He bothers to write on almost every major news issue that comes up. But I've been angry the past couple of days so perhaps this isn't the best time for me to try to decide.

[Harley]

You'd need a shrink to figure this out, but it seems to me that the slaughter of this American innnocent -- and it was, and he was -- has acted as a kind of ideological accelerant for some in blogville, and heck, outside it as well. The letter you linked to is a good example of the kind of febrile overreaction that has been pretty much par for the course for the last few days. Again, you'd need a shrink. But the shame and anger engendered by the Abu Ghraib story -- and of course the perceived threat to the war mission and the Prez, the suspicion that evil Dems were playing politics -- evolved into something different in the aftermath of the Berg murder. I haven't seen so much blog-fury in quite some time.

Gonna be a hot summer, I guess.

[Ron In Portland]

What Josh said was he had nothing to add, not that it bored him, you have been taking lessons from the Great Republican Spin Machine
My e-mail to Josh:

I want to congratulate you on your excellent reply to Ellis D.. I for one appreciate the fact that you don't rant for the sake of ranting and only post when you think you have something to add. Yours is the second blog I read each morning; sorry, with all the action in Iraq Juan Cole has to be first.

He replied, indicating he checked out Juan Cole first as well.
The blogosphere would be a better place if more people didn't post when they had nothing new to add.

[asdf]

I think that was dellis, Matt Yglesias's resident troll.

[Katherine]

My non-response to any events in the next few weeks will be because I'm 1) at my sister's college graduation, and 2) camping.

And as of this evening, I'm done with my last final & now in my final year of law school. Or at least I'm pretty sure I am--don't want to jinx anything.

Posting might be light this summer too--I don't have email access in my apartment, and can't/shouldn't do this at work, so it'll have to be from the good old public library. We'll see. In the meantime, may we all live in less interesting times.

[kenB]

JMM: I write when I feel I have something I can add to a discussion, and only then.

Certainly JMM is not the type to make moral pronouncements (on his blog, anyway), so he needn't feel obligated to post about the Berg murder. OTOH, given that (AFAICT) the things he adds to discussions are invariably things that support his own views, it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable to assume that his silence on the Berg murder meant that he couldn't find a way to work it into an attack on the current administration.

[william]

I wasn't so keen on Josh's response -- it was a bit snippy. But, equally, it did seem strange to be offended enough to stop reading a blog because a specific incident hadn't been covered in it. I could understand if it had been mentioned in an offensive way, but simply not mentioning?

Having said that, one of the reasons I stopped reading Instapundit was that there was a pattern of him failing to mention things that seemed to support the other side of the argument. But that was after a long period of getting disillusioned with his tone.

And on the larger issue... the Berg murder was awful, but I genuinely don't think it was news in the way that Abu Ghraib was, because it didn't tell us anything we didn't know. We knew that there are some psychopaths out there -- we knew it when the contractors were killed in Fallujah. We still know. Additionally, though this is a minor point, I don't know that any conclusions can be drawn about media bias from the concentration on Abu Ghraib. It seems that the people who are insistent that the Berg murder be shown on TV could, on the spin of a coin, have turned around and claimed that showing it was an example of how the media only ever brings bad news.

The one thing that I haven't seen commented on that strikes me as significant: if al-Zarqawi was actually the man in the video, what does that say about the size of his organization? It seems odd to have the CEO working the cash registers, so to speak.

[Stentor]

it did seem strange to be offended enough to stop reading a blog because a specific incident hadn't been covered in it.

I think it makes perfect sense to read only those blogs whose choice of coverage matches the issues you're interested in (such was the reason I stopped reading TPM regularly a while back). But I don't think it makes much sense to be offended or to criticize a blogger for not covering a certain issue, and it certainly doesn't make much sense to impute bad motives or bad views to them for choosing not to cover something.