Here’s a Christian Science Monitor headline from last week:
Backstory: H.L. Mencken, ‘The Sage of Baltimore,’ had a zing bloggers can’t touch
The story says nothing about bloggers or the Internet; rather, as best I can tell the article is trying to say that no-one can touch Mencken’s zing. (“There’s still time in this semicentenary year of H.L. Mencken’s passing to review his contributions to American letters and ponder why — even amid the modern effluvia of our hydra-headed media — he remains the most widely quoted American writer.”) That may well be right: Whatever you may think of his ideas or morals, the man did have a way with words, and the degree to which he continues to be quoted is evidence that he’s a hard man to top.
But he’s hard for everyone to top, whether one writes online or offline, and whether one is a professional journalist or an amateur. Perhaps he’s zingier than 100% of all bloggers. Perhaps he’s better than 99.999%. But he’s zingier than 99.999% or 100% of all modern newspaper writers, too. So why the felt need to say that Mencken (“one of ours,” I take it, in the headline writer’s and editor’s view) can’t be touched by bloggers?