The Paleolithic Dennis Shook

Dennis Shook has seen the future and he doesn't like it. Like a caveman running from the first fire he's ever seen, Shook is running from the impact of the new media, cursing the gods that brought the destruction to his happy little paleolithic home.

First it was talk radio, and his fellow columnist at the Waukesha Freeman Mark Belling took him to task. Now it's blogging. As Dean Mundy notes, Shook wrote in Saturday's Waukesha Freeman,

To those who read the rapidly reproducing blogs of the world and assign them the same kind of credibility as a newspaper. Most readers understand that this is a column of opinion and is clearly offered as such. Blog sites are also opinion and, from what I have seen, don’t even bother to try to provide empirical evidence for their expressions. Yet there are those people out there who gobble all that up and treat these blogs the same as they would treat traditional and balanced journalism. Most of the time, that is simply not the case. Turkeys for both blog misreaders and blog misleaders.

Mundy has a great response:

First, the "blog misreaders and blog misleaders" tag. Could this be some kind of envy because of the hiring of Jessica McBride, a highly respected blogger by the Freeman? Or just envy in general?

Or, perhaps, Mr. Shook has missed the fact that even the Main Stream Media itself has many blogs, MSNBC, the Washington Post, even our neighboring papers the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Madison.com among others.

But Mr. Shook is guilty of what he accuses blogs of when he states, "Blog sites are also opinion and, from what I have seen, don't even bother to try to provide empirical evidence for their expressions." Where is his evidence that blogs are misleading or that readers "assign them the same credibility of a newspaper?" Perhaps this will be in an article to appear later?

Maybe Shook is unhappy sharing an op-ed page with (talk radio) Mark Belling and (blogger) Jessica McBride. Maybe it's professional jealousy. Or maybe he's still sore about being the subject of a few blog posts himself.

Shook better get with the program, or he'll be as obsolete as neanderthal man.

Update! 1/6/05 I comment on the recent firing of Dennis Shook here.