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Salon does their own blog piece today, focusing on James Wolcott, who's site I'll be adding to the roll before too long. Gawd, it seems like all sorts of blog articles are floating around the internet lately--the New York Times ran a six or seven page piece in their Magazine section, Atrios layed down some rules of his own, and Billmon showed up in the Los Angeles Times commenting on the death of the blog. Other articles apparently are there for the reading at Kos, Chris Bowers, Washington Monthly, Hullabaloo, Steve Gilliard, and so on.

But I digress. The Salon piece is pretty good, and, as the title says, worth clicking through the ad for--or, if you're a subscriber, you're getting your money's worth.

For those without time, here are a few (update: well, more than a few, but not all) choice quotes from Wolcott, on the subject of blogs, attack poodles, and the media:

I have a lot of interests that you can't get into print, you know, just because they won't sustain a 3,000-word piece...

What I think is so fantastic [about blogs] is that there is so much more talent and braininess out in the country than you would know from just reading magazines. Frankly, if you go to a newsstand and read most magazines you're reading the same damn people that you've read for 20 years...

But I do feel like one of the things that has to be ongoing is the deterioration of CNN. What in the world is going on there? I can't even tell anymore if it's malice or just ineptitude...

Everybody on CNN is overexposed. It seems like you get Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff 20 hours a day. And Larry King. I do like the fact that Larry King doesn't seem to fit in any known universe. It's like, you've got news, news, and then "Larry King talks to psychics! Ask your dead relatives a question! Tonight!" ...

And the "Capitol Gang"! God Almighty, if we could exile them to an island, maybe they would cannibalize each other...

what is Bob Novak still doing on the air? I honestly do not understand how Bob Novak, with all the slimy stuff he's done over the years, is still not only on the air with CNN, but one of their main players...To have Novak sitting on "Crossfire" when they're actually discussing the Valerie Plame case!...

Look at what a pathetic old coot William Buckley has become. He made a very lame statement about Iraq, but when I saw him recently, promoting his new book, the main thing he wanted to come out for was the family marriage amendment. Oh, man! You've lived your life, you've learned all you've learned, you've met all these people -- and this is what you want to come out for? This is your last hurrah?...

Something that really struck me: The people I would have thought were a little more classy, a little more moderate in the conservative ranks, they jumped on and defended [the Swift Boat ads]: George Will, Bill Kristol. Now that may be a sign of how desperate they are for Bush to win. In the past, the classier conservatives would have disassociated themselves from that sort of thing...

There's a kind of a freaky admiration that media biggies have for the right wing; they sort of admire the nastiness. They consider people on the left wimpy. And even though Democratic senators have actually served in uniform, the swagger is on the right. A lot of this is masculine mode. If you look at the way Chris Matthews talks about certain people, he gets turned on by a certain kind of machismo in politicians. It could be a totally false machismo, but that is often what people get turned on by...

Also, one of the things they like to do with liberals is call them whiny. They like to portray them, in effect, as women. There's a lot of sexism involved, not to mention there is also a tremendous amount of racism...

[Michelle Malkin is] completely manufactured! There are all these people writing all these very good critiques of her history, in terms of internment of the Japanese, and how she got the history wrong. And I'm sure she did. But to me that's not the real purpose of the book. One of the things I always do with the attack poodles is, I ask myself, why are they doing this now? Why this, why now? One of the things she's doing with the internment is she's laying the groundwork for all sorts of ethnic considerations and profiling. That's part of what she's doing, because if you justify the Japanese internment, you can then justify the internment of other people. If you look at her other writing, she is big on racial profiling.

...a lot of them just are into their shameless careers. One of the things you find out about people is that there is a real addiction to being on TV. And once people start appearing on TV, they can't bear not appearing on TV...

A lot of what these people do for projects, is simply another way of getting a round of TV appearances. Like Ann Coulter has a book coming out -- it's about something like, "How to Talk to Liberals, if You Must" or something like that, and I thought, that's real desperation, that's sort of when you really run out of topics...

Believe it or not, I just spent about fifteen minutes editing this down.