Scenes from the Class Struggle

It’s a little amusing when a blogger at the Huffington Post (with a Russian name, no less) doesn’t fully recognize the class struggle when she sees it. But it’s hard to get upset with Larisa Alexandrovna for being gentle with the Associated Press when she writes of their response to her allegation that they have plagiarized one of her posts:

We do not credit blogs!

Never mind that plenty of journalists have blogs or that Raw Story is not a blog, or that the mainstream will cite blogs such as the Huffington Post while inexplicably not cite smaller blogs that have become heroic in the world of journalism for what they have uncovered. I have a nagging feeling that this random sourcing is less about freelance journalists or blogs or any other label de jour, but rather, it has everything to do with who can afford to take legal action. Clearly, they have pegged me correctly as not in any position to take on a major news organization.

But this is more than picking on the small fry. This is fear of the small fry – the media class struggle in its MSM vs. blogs essence. Don’t credit blogs unless you have to – a policy followed by the blog (competition) phobic including not only the AP, but Bill O’Reilly and Matt Drudge as well – a group that may cross ideological, but certainly not class, lines. For all of them, this is not about the search for truth. It’s about the search for bucks.