APROPOS OF PFAFF: Matt Welch thinks the punditocracy is oblivious to the sea-change taking place right under their noses:

It’s not just a question of underappreciated genius anymore. Something has been going on these past three months (not to mention the five years before that), yet 95% of large media companies – especially monopolist newspapers – seem utterly ignorant of it, or at best powerless to react to it.

What do warbloggers have in common, that most pundits do not? I’d say a yen for critical thinking, a sense of humor that actually translates into people laughing out loud, a willingness to engage (and encourage) readers, a hostility to the Culture War and other artifacts of the professionalized left-right split of the 1990s, unchecked joy at discovering clever people, a readiness to admit error, tendency to write with passion and emotion, a radar attuned to personal responsibility, a sense of collegial yet brutal peer review … I think the list is long, and most of the qualities stand apart from what you expect on the local op-ed page, or on the cable teevee show.

The unanswered question: Is the newspaper-reading, cable-watching, radio-listening public actually starting to savor all of these terrific weapons-grade warblogs in significant numbers? Or are they still feeding, indiscriminately and in the same numbers as always, at the Dowd/O'Reilly/Limbaugh trough?