Iowahawk has been first-draft dumpster-diving again; this time he’s surfaced with an early version of Wall Street Journal columnist Joseph Rago’s attack on the blogosphere.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared, preening, narcissist curators would like to think. Real journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age — it takes hardbitten, cynical J-school trained newshounds in fedoras and trench coats, willing to dig and probe and expense whatever it takes to break the big story, getting their facts straight the first time, and making sure they’ve saved all the relevant fact-gathering receipts. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, these filthy, bottom-feeding parasites are like aquatic lice, clinging to the underside of leeches who suck blood from the remora fish who cowardly ride along the belly of this proud, aging shark I call “professional journalism.”

More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some thoughtful critics note that blogs tend to disinhibit, and are responsible the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life; and, for that reason alone, these critics note that blogs should just go screw themselves. Maybe so. But politics weren’t much rarefied when proto-blogger John Wilkes Booth was venting his opinion at fordtheater.com back in ‘65. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling. Seriously bad, to the point of physical, gastrointestinal revulsion. Full-on, projectile vomit stuff.

Don’t believe me? Go read some blogs. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Read the whole thing. As a member of the keening blog rabble, it is your duty.