You know, it used to be easy to write satire of (literally) sophomoric columns in college newspapers, by writing something like “Top Ten Reasons America Sucks.”
Sadly, they’ve raised the bar, and taken away such an easy theme.
Next thing you know, you won’t be able to spoof the lefty professoriate by calling innocent people who died in the World Trade Center things like “little Eichmanns.”
He has a couple about the Eason Jordan “kerfuffle:”
Overlooking the larger scene, Michael Barone of US News writes: “The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.”
Barone, a friend to the right blogosphere, is correct– and he’s being candid. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is the Mainstream Media. (For the Left it’s Bush, he says.) I want to know what the right blogosphere says back. Not to me, although that’s fine too, but to Michael Barone. Is he right?
I don’t know how to answer that question (though I agree with his diagnosis of the MSM from the perspective of the “right blogosphere”), because it’s a complex one (in the literal sense of the phrase). I don’t consider myself part of the “right blogosphere.” I doubt if Glenn Reynolds does either. Until we get past this simplistic need to label, I’m not sure that we’ll make much progress in having a dialogue (which leads to his next question):
In an effort to go dialogic, I asked Will Collier of Vodka Pundit (who got into it with Steve Lovelady of CJR Daily) a question that I hope is both pointed and open ended: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or help cause its destruction? (Or is there a third and fourth alternative we should be discussing?) This is something the blogging world should take a moment for and reflect upon.
There’s at least a third (and probably a fourth and fifth, and…). The points are to get the MSM to 1) recognize that it has a problem with political bias; 2) to recognize that this bias tilts politically to whatever is meant by the “left” to those who accuse some of the blogosphere of being on the “right;” and 3) to come up with some means of addressing this issue, and some means of bringing accountability to those who spin the news in a certain direction while expressing outrage that their coverage is characterized as anything other than “objective.”
Howzat for an alternative, Mr. Rosen?
He has a couple about the Eason Jordan “kerfuffle:”
Overlooking the larger scene, Michael Barone of US News writes: “The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.”
Barone, a friend to the right blogosphere, is correct– and he’s being candid. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is the Mainstream Media. (For the Left it’s Bush, he says.) I want to know what the right blogosphere says back. Not to me, although that’s fine too, but to Michael Barone. Is he right?
I don’t know how to answer that question (though I agree with his diagnosis of the MSM from the perspective of the “right blogosphere”), because it’s a complex one (in the literal sense of the phrase). I don’t consider myself part of the “right blogosphere.” I doubt if Glenn Reynolds does either. Until we get past this simplistic need to label, I’m not sure that we’ll make much progress in having a dialogue (which leads to his next question):
In an effort to go dialogic, I asked Will Collier of Vodka Pundit (who got into it with Steve Lovelady of CJR Daily) a question that I hope is both pointed and open ended: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or help cause its destruction? (Or is there a third and fourth alternative we should be discussing?) This is something the blogging world should take a moment for and reflect upon.
There’s at least a third (and probably a fourth and fifth, and…). The points are to get the MSM to 1) recognize that it has a problem with political bias; 2) to recognize that this bias tilts politically to whatever is meant by the “left” to those who accuse some of the blogosphere of being on the “right;” and 3) to come up with some means of addressing this issue, and some means of bringing accountability to those who spin the news in a certain direction while expressing outrage that their coverage is characterized as anything other than “objective.”
Howzat for an alternative, Mr. Rosen?
He has a couple about the Eason Jordan “kerfuffle:”
Overlooking the larger scene, Michael Barone of US News writes: “The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.”
Barone, a friend to the right blogosphere, is correct– and he’s being candid. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is the Mainstream Media. (For the Left it’s Bush, he says.) I want to know what the right blogosphere says back. Not to me, although that’s fine too, but to Michael Barone. Is he right?
I don’t know how to answer that question (though I agree with his diagnosis of the MSM from the perspective of the “right blogosphere”), because it’s a complex one (in the literal sense of the phrase). I don’t consider myself part of the “right blogosphere.” I doubt if Glenn Reynolds does either. Until we get past this simplistic need to label, I’m not sure that we’ll make much progress in having a dialogue (which leads to his next question):
In an effort to go dialogic, I asked Will Collier of Vodka Pundit (who got into it with Steve Lovelady of CJR Daily) a question that I hope is both pointed and open ended: Is the point to have a dialogue with the MSM or help cause its destruction? (Or is there a third and fourth alternative we should be discussing?) This is something the blogging world should take a moment for and reflect upon.
There’s at least a third (and probably a fourth and fifth, and…). The points are to get the MSM to 1) recognize that it has a problem with political bias; 2) to recognize that this bias tilts politically to whatever is meant by the “left” to those who accuse some of the blogosphere of being on the “right;” and 3) to come up with some means of addressing this issue, and some means of bringing accountability to those who spin the news in a certain direction while expressing outrage that their coverage is characterized as anything other than “objective.”
Howzat for an alternative, Mr. Rosen?
Where’s the video tape?
That was the question emanating from the blogosphere all last week. As many have pointed out, while we’ll take scalps occasionally, the Eason Jordan affair wasn’t about taking scalps (though I plead guilty to calling for his head if the tape showed the allegations to be true). It was about honesty and accountability.
Somehow, now that the chum of Jordan has been thrown to the sharks of the web, there may be a hope among many that the calls for the release of the tape, or a transcript (which may be much less damaging, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute) will die down.
Many are noting that if the tape exonerated, or mitigated Jordan’s alleged comments, it would have appeared by now. That’s true, but it misses a big part of the story. I don’t think that this was just about the MSM protecting one of their own. I think that it may be about protecting itself, or at least many members of it.
I have to wonder if that tape would show (and perhaps more starkly and much more graphically than a black and white transcript) not just Jordan’s words, but the approving reception of them by his Davos cohorts? The nods of recognition, the lack of any challenge, perhaps even murmurs of appreciation, until Rony Abovitz and Barney Frank spoke up. Gergen may have appeared concerned, and eventually changed the subject, but how long did it go on, and who was cheering Eason on? Was Iowahawk closer to reality than we thought? Who else will this tape embarrass (or should embarrass), and reflect poorly on?
Somehow, I suspect that if we were to see that video, it would provide much more than a brief glimpse into the soul of Eason Jordan. It might reveal the depths of the anti-military (and anti-American, or at least anti-Bush) sentiment in his colleagues as well, in an unguarded moment when they forgot that others were watching. And perhaps it’s their hope that by sacrificing Jordan, the rest of them can continue, incognito and unharried, in their undeclared war against the hyperpower.
Whether my speculation is correct or not, I don’t think that we should take Jordan’s resignation as a victory–it’s perhaps a distraction, and we should continue to demand the tape.
[Update at 2:30 PM EST]
A commenter claims that the remarks were off the record. How strange, then, to have an official videotape of a meeting that was supposed to be “off the record.”
[Another update a couple minutes later]
Bill Roggio has similar thoughts.
Ramesh Ponnuru is reporting that Eason Jordan just resigned.
I guess that some folks really didn’t want that videotape to get out, to protect the CNN brand. I wonder if Jonathan Klein is getting himself fitted for some pajamas?
Note the timing also. Late Friday aftenoon, so everyone will have forgotten about it by Monday.
Does that trick still work in the era of the blogosphere?
At the WaPo.
When are they going to learn what a blog is? Hint: Free Republic isn’t one, doesn’t have one, and its commenters are not “bloggers.”
I think that to the degree they think they know what a blog is, in their minds, it probably means “people who post stuff on that Internet thingie that somehow, unaccountably, keeps making us look bad.”
Commenter “Vulgorilla” asks a very simple question, about CBS, CNN and the MSM in general, over at Austin Bay’s site:
There’s an interesting op-ed about the Columbia Journalism Review over at the new DC Examiner. However, the author misses an important point when she writes:
Blogs these days are holding the MSM’s feet to the fire, forcing newspapers and TV news shows to reflect the country’s politics more accurately.
Yes, they’re doing that, but even more importantly, they’re holding the MSM’s feet to the fire in an attempt to get them to do honest and informed reporting, instead of agenda-driven, ignorant (and often illogical) hackery, of which the subject of the article, Corey Pein’s piece on Rathergate, was a textbook case. The op-ed in fact demonstrates this quite clearly:
Newcomer, who voted for Sen. John Kerry in November, was baffled. When I spoke with him recently, he told me that The New Yorker once called his wife, a botanical illustration expert, to ask whether a certain plant could grow in a certain area, because a fiction writer had mentioned it in a piece. That was fact-checking. CJR “did not do any fact-checking,” he says. Pein did spend weeks researching his story, even traveling to Texas to report it. He wrote that CBS screwed up. But the suggestion that blogs were “guilty of many of the very same sins” that CBS committed, and that Newcomer did not know what he was talking about, set the blogosphere howling.
The point of the blogosphere is not so much to get the media to, in the words of the former Clinton administration in another context, “look more like America,” but rather to get them to actually provide balanced and informed newsreporting. For too long have they been allowed to get away with laziness and incompetence. That’s what we are attempting to provide a corrective for, not just the (obvious) political bias.
[Update at 9:30 AM]
Case in point can be found here:
James Watt has written to Bill Moyers, asking him to apologize for the lies in his Star Tribune article. After quoting Moyers’ statements about him, Watt wrote:
I have never thought, believed or said such words. Nor have I ever said anything similar to that thought which could be interpreted by a reasonable person to mean anything similar to the quote attributed to me.
Because you are at least average in intelligence and have a basic understanding of Christian beliefs, you know that no Christian would believe what you attributed to me.
Because you have had the privilege of serving in the White House under President Johnson, you know that no person believing such a thing would be qualified for a Presidential appointment, nor would he be confirmed by the United States Senate, and if confirmed and said such a thing would he be allowed to continue in service.
Since you must have known such a statement would not have been made and you refused or failed to do any primary research on this supposed quote, what was your motive in printing such a damnable lie?
Before the advent of the blogosphere, Bill Moyers–arrogant, rich, powerful and well-connected–would merely have thrown Mr. Watt’s letter into the trash. Today, he may still do so. But he and his friends in the liberal media no longer have a monopoly on information, and those who have been defamed by them, like James Watt, now have the means to make their voices heard.
Yes, Bill Moyers is a leftist, vastly out of touch with Red America, but the real issue is that for years he’s been getting away with these kinds of slanders and libels.
The blogosphere exists to (among many other things, of course) finally allow the truth to come out, ripping open the comfortable cocoons of media polemicists of all stripes. That most of the ire is aimed at so-called progressives is not because the blogosphere has it in for people of that political persuasion per se, but rather because, given the monoculture of the MSM, there are largely only one species of fish in the barrel. As Jim Geraghty says, it’s not ultimately about right and left. It’s about right and wrong.
I don’t link CNN that much anyway, but I’m totally on board with this. What few links I give CNN will henceforth be zero until the Eason Jordan matter is resolved satisfactorily. At this point, to me that means getting his walking papers, unless the transcript truly shows a massive misunderstanding.
Of course, I think that he should have been canned after admitting that he covered up Saddam’s crimes in return for access. After the Dan Rather whitewash, I’ve reached a point of zero tolerance for this kind of crap.