Who is Joseph Rago?

Maybe I'll read the WSJ more closely in the future, but I look at the editorial pages every day and could not tell who Joseph Rago is. And I still cannot, other than he's the self-righteous prig who views all blogs as electronic entities "[w]ritten by fools to be read by imbeciles." Does Rago deem Opinion Journal's Best of the Web feature -- the WSJ's own editorial page blog by James Taranto -- in the same light?

The sick thing about the mainstream media is that, by and large, it has inflated senses of its importance, its ethics, its accuracy and its collective intellect. I'm an attorney who went to top schools, Wongdoer is a Harvard grad. Glenn Instapundit Reynolds is a law professor, as are Hugh Hewitt and Ann Althouse.

Dan Rather graduated from the Texas State Teachers College. Most journalists were not special -- child geniuses do not gravitate toward the police beat in the small-town paper or the internship at the college station that start the career of many journos. Anyone can be a journalist if s/he seeks news, writes about it accurately, and ensures an opportunity for both sides of the story to comment. It's not that hard. I was not self-taught as a college journalist, but learned from the upperclassmen at the college paper. That's it. And I was a professional-quality journalist within a year of starting with the paper.

So the self-exultation of the media is really quite a bore. And ultimately self-defeating. The more you keep talking about your indispensibility, the more time others spend doing what you claim only you can do -- and do it just as well.