TV and the Web

I had a haircut during the Pope’s funeral. My hairdresser knows me well enough to switch it away from Oprah or equivalent and over to CNN or equivalent when I’m in the chair, so I got to watch a half-hour of that coverage. At one point they broke from the endless succession of talking heads and panoramic crowd shots to “visit with the bloggers”; they had two attractive young things propped up in front of flat-panels to tell us what the bloggers were saying about the late Pope. I found it disturbing. To start with, Andrew Sullivan, one of the top ten most popular bloggers in the world, is a gay right-wing anguished-Catholic type (and in the unlikely event that his theology is correct, will spend a couple millennia in Purgatory over some of his 9/11 commentary, but that’s another story); he was emitting multiple intense, erudite, from-the-heart bulletins on the Meaning of John Paul II every day. I’d also read a half-dozen really challenging papacy pieces on a bunch of other blogs; for example, whatever you may think of JP2, he presided over the possibly-terminal decline of his church in Western Europe, what does that mean? Did CNN cover any of those? They did not; they went to a half-dozen apparently random selections where the writers were saying things along the lines of “I’m like so sad.” They were pretty well all from blogspot.com. When the camera focused in, you couldn’t read anything. There was one that was mildly interesting and they read off the address but something went wrong because when I went there, I found no Pope stuff. So am I a filthy anti-Long-Tail elitist because I was disturbed by CNN’s apparent lack of concern for quality and intensity?