Some of you may have listened to NPR's two-hour report on blogs last night, so you will know what I'm talking about, but the rest of you may be getting bits and pieces of it second- or third-hand for the next week, so I will try to summarize it for you. The first hour and forty minutes was taken up by assorted media Big Feet, including liberal Josh Marshall and conservative Jeff Jarvis, feeding us a dry encapsulation of the potential of the new medium (as you might expect, Jarvis brought up the New York Times' refusal to give front page treatment to an anti-Saddam demonstration in the streets of Baghdad last month that drew several thousand; it's becoming a tired rant, akin to Snitchens' tirades about the brain-addled murderer Clinton executed in 1992).

The last twenty minutes featured the long-awaited confrontation between Andrew Sullivan and "Atrios". Neither came across with any distinction. Sullivan, apparently nursing scars from insults, real and perceived, and being unwilling to actually respond on his blog (and thereby link) to anyone to the left of Prof. Reynolds, attacked the anonymity of "Atrios", as if the Philadelphia gym teacher was the first to come up with the idea of publishing under a pseudonym. Besides the fact that Sully himself linked to a conservative blogger, "Tacitus", earlier that day without denouncing his "lack of transparency", anonymous screeds have made a rich contribution to Anglo-American political thought; the Federalist Papers, for example, could be considered a late-eighteenth century proto-blog written by several anonymous writers.

"Atrios", however, illustrated another weakness of the blogosphere: a lack of seriousness about language. When Sully criticized Eschaton for being unwilling to attack his own side, "Atrios" called him a liar. As I mentioned back on January 6, accusing someone of lying ought to be a serious accusation, but bloggers use it instead as a shorthand way of saying that the other guy is wrong about an issue. What has become a perfectly banal insult over the internet resonates quite differently when you actually hear it said over a national radio program.

What's worse, though, was when Atrios was actually called on that statement, he couldn't give an example. Of course, it would have been nice if Sullivan actually had visited Eschaton before making his statement: the very post that topped the blog during the radio program reported on dirty tricks one candidate was using against Howard Dean in New Hampshire, hardly the actions of someone who has any hesitation about going after his own side.

And Atrios has nothing to apologize for publishing a more partisan website than Sullivan's; after all, Sully's crowd is in power, controls most of the political, cultural and business institutions in our society, while the insurgent's role that Atrios has chosen to play necessarily must focus its attacks on the opposition. Sully himself has a side he won't attack: witness his unwillingness to repudiate Matt Drudge's deliberate dowdification of General Clark's Congressional testimony a few weeks back. But still, you can hardly claim the other guy is deliberately misstating what's on your blog when you don't really know either.