The distinction is important, because in journalism, what matters most is veracity, accuracy, and authority. Well, what used to matter most and should still matter today. But what matters most in fiction is entertainment (at least in my biased opinion); to the extent that character, complexity, literary landscaping, wordsmithing, and creativity matter in literature, they matter because thinking persons (my own audience) find such traits entertaining and are less entertained by mindless, derivative trash, à la the last seventeen or eighteen Anne Rice vampire novels.

This is not to say that blogposts are fiction, only that the appropriate standard for both is the same. Indeed, I struggle to make mine nonfiction; but I also attempt, at least, to make them entertaining!

On those occasions where Michelle Malkin (or Captain Ed Morrissey, or the Power Line gents) conducts original research, interviews sources, and breaks news stories, she is not blogging; she is rather engaging in open-source journalism -- and publishing it on what otherwise is a blog.

So my premise is that blogging falls under the same literary rules as fiction, not the distinct rules of professional journalism -- whether heirarchical or open-source. But what are these standards anyway?

From the basic premise that the primary duty of fiction is to entertain the reader, we infer several corollaries; I will list those that dispute Auguste's post from the Liberal Avenger:

• It's the lying

In the fiction standard, truth clearly does not mean the exact recitation of events that actually occurred, since that would mean all fiction was a lie -- which renders the term meaningless in that context. Rather, truth is the honest exploration of process. A fictionalize account of a romance, for example, is "honest" or "true to life" if it accurately depicts how two people might fall in love, showing all the pitfalls and bad mistakes as well as the beauty and terror... in other words, if the reader gets the feeling he is reading about real people in real situations.

In this sense, the byline is part of the product. Arthur Conan Doyle is not being dishonest when he pretends that the Sherlock Holmes tales were actually written by Dr. John Watson instead, because Conan Doyle writes as much like the character "Watson" would as one could possibly do; Watson is, if anything, even more alive than Holmes, because we see his thinking process so much more clearly.

Thus, even if Liberal Avenger's supposition is correct, and "Michelle Malkin" is a persona (like "Enya") rather than an individual blogger, so much the better! Because the posts come across as written by a single integrated human being. If two people are writing them, they're darned good at it.

• It's the scandal

  Michelle has always been very hot on the idea that blogs are home to better reporting than the mainstream media. Well, one of Rick Bragg's biggest transgressions was allowing others to write stories under his byline. If Michelle were to admit that "Michelle Malkin" is a generic byline for both herself and Jesse, then fine. Except, of course...

This is pretzel logic. Michelle Malkin did not say "blogs must be held to journalistic standards." She doesn't demand they have editors separate and distinct from the authors, for example, nor that they adhere to "two-source" rules and suchlike. Thus, Rick Bragg's "transgression" is a non-sequitur. Literature abounds with supposedly single-author books that are in fact collaborations, and they cause no scandal at all.

• It's the persona

  A quick glance through Technorati reveals, if one didn't know already, that Michelle is something of a right-wing darling.... It seems more than possible that Jesse Malkin, as a white male producing anti-immigrant, racially focused writings, would only ever be a face in the crowd.

For this to violate standards of literature, this "persona" would have to contradict Michelle Malkin's own, true personality, character, and beliefs... like if I were to ghost-write a hagiography of John Kerry simply because I was paid to do so.

But anybody who has seen Michelle on any of her numerous excursions on Fox News Channel (usually Hannity and Colmes) knows in his gut that those really are her opinions, beliefs, and passions. She could not possibly argue them as effectively in the heat of battle if she were simply parroting her husband -- which is, let's be honest, what Liberal Avenger is really saying in the first post: he is implying that a simple Joisey goil couldn't possibly be such an excellent writer or make such devastating critiques... so it must really be the man in her life.

This strikes me as a decidedly illiberal sentiment, but that is not the point. I think that if pressed, even Liberal Avenger would have to agree that the evidence indicates this "persona" matches Michelle Malkin's known "self," and we dispense with this argument.

• It's the questions it raises

The question to which Auguste refers is one of propriety of interests. Auguste quotes LA:

Has "Michelle" ever blogged or written about topics related to what Jesse was working on for the government at the think tank while Jesse was still connected with the think tank in any way?

But that is not the question: if Liberal Avenger or Auguste wants to charge Jesse Malkin with revealing any proprietary information covered under classification or a non-disclosure agreement, he needs to come right out and say so -- and produce some evidence. My wife, Sachi, works for an employer who has proprietary information; yet she is perfectly free to blog about all sorts of "topics related to" her area of expertise... there are only certain, specific things she must avoid revealing.

Journalists should steer clear of subjects with which they are too intimately involved, as dispassionate reporting is (supposed to be) the sine qua non of good journalism. But contrast a newspaper article with such great works of literary fiction as Ralph Ellison's the Invisible Man and Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Would anyone deny that the intense personal experience the authors had in these precise areas -- Ellison was, indeed, an erudite black man living in New York City in the 1940s, and Heller absolutely did fly 60 combat missions as the bombardier in a B-25 flying out of Corsica -- contributed to, rather than detracted from, their works?

The point is made: the crabs and snivels by which Auguste attempts to indict Michelle Malkin for the crime of being half of an unannounced collaboration (whether she is "guilty" or not is another question) have a common error... assuming that the proper standard to judge blogging is the journalistic standard of either a newspaper of high repute, such as the Washington Times, or even a squalid piece of yellow journalism, such as the New York Times.

But the correct standard to use is that of literature, rather than newspaper writing; and without addressing how Michelle Malkin and/or husband Jesse stack up on the scale that runs from a Joseph Conrad at the top to an Edward Bulwer-Lytton at the bottom, clearly the question of whether her husband also writes under the name "Michelle Malkin" is a non-issue.

That "question" is in fact completely irrelevant to the only urgent query: does "Michelle Malkin" write well? To which each reader may craft his own answer, in blissful ignorance of the exact composition of the author.