Steve Gilliard Remembered (MSM style)

I didn’t know Steve Gilliard personally, but I linked early on to his blog and loved to read his often incendiary rants. Steve was a great New York writer, a military historian, and a voice for social justice. When he died this year at 39, we lost a wonderfully frank and intelligent voice.

Readers can check out Steve’s work in the column at the left under the links called “In Suspended Animation” at The News Blog and The New News Blog.

Tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine will run a piece by Matt Bai about Steve, which is a decent, if somewhat unilluminating remembrance. I was alerted to it by Parachutec, writing at Firedoglake, who laments that Steve never got the Times pulpit in life that he has now achieved in death. Gilliard was one of the few bloggers I read who paid great attention to New York stories that mattered as well as to the national and international political beat that drives most of the political blogosphere. It would have been great to see him in dead tree print, but let’s face it— we’re out here in the blogosphere because the MSM wouldn’t run voices like his.

Parachutec’s piece accounts for the flesh and blood Steve Gilliard who readers knew had important relationships outside the internets, about whom he would write. Unlike Bai, Parachutec also points out that the blogospheric left isn’t lily-white and upscale. I guess Bai didn’t speak to the folks Steve knew, just figured all the white boys at the wake were bloggers.

Still, I’m glad Bai chose to write about Gilliard and to give him the due that none of the MSM would pay him in life.