Back in my day, the professional commentators never even appeared in public before they had been vetted. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather went up through the media bureaucracy to get into the small group from which their Anchor Man status was chosen.

Blog audiences are one hell of a lot tougher. You don’t have to complain when I let you down, though I would prefer it. You just don’t show up.

When I was getting dangerously tired, I took some time off and BoardAd, who knows my writings better than anybody else, would put in Blasts From the Past from a decade of writing and my books.

BoardAd called me back fast because our readership from dropping like a rock.

That was an IMPORTANT experience, and unlike the old Commentators, I had to THINK about it.

In the days when ABC, NBC, CBS and “Educational” TV were the only choices, people wrote thousands of letters of complaint. Rather could tell those people to go to hell if they didn’t like his East Coast opinions.

The blog world is, to say the least, a bit different. You have literally millions of choices and more every day. We used to need TV as our one choice for visual entertainment at home. But the blog world doesn’t even have that advantage. Most people use the Internet all the time and never look at a blog.

It reminds me of how Mommy Professor is always praising the Marxist countries because there “The Intellectual” is supposed to rule. A Mommy Professor wouldn’t last two weeks in a real Communist bureaucracy.

Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite wouldn’t last a week on a blog except for their Big Names. Phil Donahue tried a cable network show, Big Name and all, where he commented on politics. He was out on his ass in a month.

Everybody who goes on the Internet, like our White Rabbit, finds that he has to offer lots of news, no matter what he would LIKE to repeat. It is an astounding accomplishment that BUGS gets a thousands of hits and a steadily growing audience while sticking to my strategy advice and commentary.

For me, you BUGSers represent an accomplishment no big blog can claim.

And I LISTEN. Dan Rather could and did ignore thousands of complaints as a matter of routine.

But I don’t get that much warning. One commenter simply mentioned that, “Bob is very interesting when he isn’t talking about himself.”

You better believe I thought about that on and on and on: It warned me about the Old Man’s Disease of ruminating.

In the Dan Rather world, a thousand letters one way or the other didn’t matter much. He dealt in tens of millions and he was part of a monopoly.

In the blog world, you are here because you choose it. The Donahues and the Rathers went down like rocks when cable news came in.

BUGSers compliment me a lot. As I said, keep your mind on the COMPETITION. Nobody is here unless they really LIKE what I have to say. With millions of blogs and all else to choose from, it would be absurd if the people who read BUGS DIDN’T think I was pretty great.

Also, we are a considerate group of people. Psychopaths and sadists don’t show up here. A person who is genuinely worried about the survival of his race is the opposite of the kind of person who is only out for himself, or even the majority whose main worry is Popular Opinion.

So I study your comments. People who didn’t like Rather told him so.

It sounds trite, but it is a profound truth: I am dealing with people who CARE.

Not only do you care, you care about something the entire establishment is screaming at you NOT to care about.

To an old man who dealt in questioning people, you don’t have to shout at me or acidly criticize me for me to HEAR you.

And, since I know that you do CARE, I can dig out stuff I need to think about even when you are barely saying it.

When I say one of my crowd is worth thousands, I MEAN it. I am doing the arithmetic, not flattering you.

The blog market is TOUGH. I LIKE it.