On Chait

TNR in its weird way invited me to write a response to Jonathan Chait's big article on the netroots and here it is. I have almost endlessly complicated thoughts on this subject, but since I was writing in TNR I focused primarily on Chait's rather odd understanding of the netroots/TNR relationship rather than the many other issues that are in play. I think it's interesting that Atrios says he named Jon Chait as his favorite columnist just a few years ago. When I was interviewing for jobs in journalism back in the spring of 2003 this question came up a lot and I always named Jon in this regard. It occurs to me that this probably isn't a coincidence. More than anything else, Chait's brand of "ass-welt reporting" prefigured blogging in a significant way. His method was, is, and probably always will be fairly marginal in the magazine world but has really come into its own on the internet.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/05/on-chait/42218/