Last night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly engaged in one of his usual diatribes against bloggers. In attempting to demonstrate that the blogosphere is full of extreme hate-mongers, O’Reilly criticized both conservative and liberal blogs for allowing commenters to freely post opinions with which the sites may not agree.

In his “policing the net” segment, O’Reilly displayed a few hateful comments against Judge Sonia Sotomayor that were posted on Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air blog. Then O’Reilly set his sights on ThinkProgress (aka “the insects”):

ThinkProgress, another crazy website on the left: “It will be so funny seeing a bunch of old white guys questioning her during the Senate hearings.” Nothing racist about that. You know, these people — as I said on the conservative guy — they don’t think that they’re racist. They don’t think that they’re bigoted. But you know, it’s so obvious they are.

In both cases, O’Reilly was not quoting posts on ThinkProgress or Hot Air. Rather, he was referencing a couple of the many commenters that post to each site. Watch it:

You have to forgive O’Reilly because he doesn’t actually “go on the Internet” to figure out what he’s talking about. Conservatives are rightfully criticizing O’Reilly for unfairly attacking Hot Air. Allahpundit writes, “Ah, there’s nothing like yanking a comment out of context and using it to smear the entire site.”

The comments policy of this blog — like most blogs on the Internet — is to allow postings from people with whom we agree and disagree. ThinkProgress values and appreciates an open commenting section that allows for a candid and frank exchange of views. Those comments do not always reflect the positions and views of the site’s editors and authors. As long as commenters abide by our terms of use, they are free to post whatever they’d like, even things which offend Bill O’Reilly’s sensitivities.

It’s worth recalling, of course, that O’Reilly’s own website has allowed commenters to post hateful things in the past. But thankfully, O’Reilly is around to help police us all.

It’s certainly an interesting development that Josh Marshall’s decided to break with his previous practice and hire well-established MSM veteran Matt Cooper to head up his new TPM DC bureau and blog rather than the usually crew of scrappy underdogs. I’d count myself as pretty skeptical about this development, but I’m not really comfortable questioning Josh’s judgment on these sorts of things.

I worked on a very part-time basis for TPM Media in what I guess you’d call its larval stage and even though I was—and am—a huge fan of Josh’s writing, I didn’t think the more ambitious projects he had in mind were really workable. Obviously I was dead wrong about that and Josh and the people he hired went on to build one of the most amazing new institutions of our time. So we’ll see.

Foreign Policy magazine is going to be bolstering its web presence with a new group blog that apparently will feature Daniel Drezner and Marc Lynch along with other similar sorts whose identities I don’t yet know. This seems like a great project. I’m especially excited about Lynch. Drezner is a sharp thinker and a good blogger, but I think the kind of point-of-view he has is already pretty well-reflected in the US media.

Lynch, on the other hand, like Juan Cole comes out of the weirdly neglected corner of academia that specializes in knowing things about the Middle East. You would have thought that 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would bring a lot more prominence to people working in this field. But instead, the mainstream views represented in this field weren’t — and aren’t — what the political powers that be wanted to hear so somehow the conclusion came about that Bernard Lewis was the only Middle East expert worth listening to about anything. After all, he was willing to tell people what they wanted to hear!

One of the things the blogosphere has done, however, has been to open up some space in which a more diverse set of voices can be heard. I’ve been a reader of Lynch’s blog for years, going back to before he had tenure and it was a pseudonymous site. Back then, the about page asserted that the unnamed author was an expert on Arab media and political reform, and at one point I realized that I wanted to quote something this fellow had said for a print article. But whereas on the blog it was fine to attribute something to Abu Aardvark, that wasn’t going to fly in print so I had to uncover the writer’s secret identity and I was certainly glad when it turned out to be a real expert. Meanwhile, besides Middle East issues Lynch also has considerable expertise in the field of comic books which I hope FP will consider an important area.

Adam Thierer writes about “internet optimists” versus “internet pessimists”:

The problem with the Internet pessimists, however, is that their skepticism often borders on Chicken Little-ism or outright Ludditism. I thought Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur was about as over-the-top as things could get in this regard. (See my 2-part book review here and here), but then I worked my way through Lee Siegal’s tedious screed, Against the Machine. It made Keen seem downright reasonable and cheery by comparison! Keen and Siegal seem to be in heated competition for the title “High Prophet of Internet Doom,” but Siegal is currently a nose ahead in that race.

And it’s true — Keen’s book is quite annoying, but Siegel’s absolutely blows it away. Both, though, seem a bit like cleverly postmodern efforts to undercut their own theses and prove that the quality control mechanisms of traditional media don’t actually work. Lots of blogs suck, in other words, but so do lots of books.