George Will Hates "You"

Posted by Alexander Zaitchik at 3:36 PM on December 22, 2006.

"You" knew it was coming. As soon as Time magazine crowned All of Us "Person of the Year" and pasted gimmicky foil mirrors on the cover of its iconic money mule, the countdown began on a torrent of Big Media dismissals. It started even before the issue went to press, when Brian Williams was tapped to register his dissent as part of the "Person of the Year" feature package. The NBC anchor worries that the nation will "miss the next great book or the next great idea, or that we will fail to meet the next great challenge...because we are too busy celebrating ourselves" amid the white noise of millions of online diaries and politics blogs.

The implication here is that the next great idea or book will be thoughtfully presented to a distracted America by NBC, home of the "Today" show. Despite the idiocy of Brian Williams lecturing anybody about the intelligent consumption of information, his critique was quoted with approval in an anti-"You" fastball with more mustard on it -- George Will's Dec. 21 column, entitled, "Full Esteem Ahead." Like Williams, Will is unhappy that so many formerly passive media-consumers have become merry media-makers, contributing to the online orgy of opinion that Time calls "the new digital Democracy."

Oh, is George Will pissed. The bow-tied one clearly and deeply resents the fact that he will spend the rest of his life watching his stature and influence wane, occasionally getting eaten alive by Americans who have always had a better sense of humor and now have their very own column spaces.

For Will, the explosion of online diaries and citizen journalism is hardly worth talking about, let alone celebrating. Time's decision to recognize "You" is a "narcissistic" expression of a "populist mood" born from a need for that "capricious modern entitlement...self-esteem." The web offers almost nothing of substance, rails Will; it is a mere "chaos of entertainment [and] solipsism" created by "amateurs."

How many amateurs does it take to make George Will apoplectic? It's hard to say, because Will has forgotten how to count. He is left so distraught by the talk of media democracy that he tries to pull a stat-trick unworthy of a 12-year-old with a hot pink MySpace page dedicated to unicorns. Pointing out that 37 percent of bloggers told the Pew Internet Project that their primary aim is to document their personal lives, Will concludes that George III would prefer to "deal with 100 million bloggers rather than one [Thomas] Paine." But the Pew statistic is better served flipped: It shows that more than 60 percent of bloggers write about politics, society, and the arts. And more than a few of them have led Big Media on stories and criticism in all three categories, as Will knows full well.

Will also claims that 99.9 percent of the Web's content lacks "seriousness" by his standards. By this Will probably means there are too many YouTube clips, too many Internet jokes, and not enough hyper-intellectual baseball sites. I think the 99.9 percent figure is high, but to nudge the number in Will's favor, here's a joke I'm still trying to get right, with apologies to the Zucker Bros. of Naked Gun fame. Two friends are talking Iraq policy:

"Thirty-thousand more troops? Surely, they can't be serious about this 'Surge'?"

"They are serious, Shirley. And please stop calling me Serge."

Come to think of it, maybe Will is right. Down with bad Internet jokes. Down with the amateurs. A Krauthammer in every pot and on every screen!

Alexander Zaitchik is a journalist in Washington, D.C.