I read Greenwald all the time and I do not find him to be humorless. Like many progressives who have a deep dislike of recent developments in the USA, he currently focusses on using irony, snark and sarcasm extensively as devices for pointing out the sheer vapidity and superficiality of the media’s coverage of most modern political and societal issues.

I happen to believe that one of the reasons why the mainstream media is pissing me off is that most of its practitioners decided (consciously or sub-consciously) that they would rather entertain than inform.

As far as horseracism is concerned…I would say that the sites I frequent in the blogosphere tend to shy away from horseracism, but there are plenty of sites, bloggers and commenters out there that are as wedded to the horse-race concept as the mainstream media. I would rate the blogosphere overall as only slightly better than the mainstream.

Jay Rosen has interesting postings and discussions on this issue at pressthink.org, during which he points out that the horse-race metaphor has been with us for decades.

Where media criticism is concerned, I’d say that Shafer is Bugs to Greenwald’s Daffy.

Greenwald stokes the anti-MSM embers of the blogosphere. It’s just tiresome after a while. He’s certainly brilliant; his defense of Ezra Levant, a Canadian journalist hauled before a hate speech tribunal, was sublime.

But I haven’t seen Greenwald with a sense of humor. Maybe I’ve missed those pieces. Slate, in the overall picture, is pretty entertaining and informative.

Question to armchair media critics out there: would you say that the blogosphere stems “horseracism” — or encourages it?

For anyone looking, a google search tells me that Nomi Prins recently compared Obama v. Clinton on economic issues in Mother Jones. 8 people have blogged about it.