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Posted on 11/25/2004 7:52:43 AM PST by HighWheeler
Hoo-boy. It's a hot time in the old blogtown.
The pajamahadeen are firing their virtual bullets into the cyber-air in celebration of CBS anchor Dan Rather's announcement on Tuesday that he was retiring as the top talking face of the network after 24 years.
"This has been a simply outstanding month," crowed a poster on http://www.freerepublic.com. "Bush won, Arafat died, we're kicking ass in Fallujah, and now this!"
Typically, the above-quoted "Freeper" didn't get that Rather may be down, but he certainly isn't out. When he steps down as front man for The CBS Evening News on March 9, he will stay on as correspondent for the still much-watched 60 Minutes, as well as perform other assignments.
So it was a bit premature to be celebrating the defeat of the veteran journalist who has inspired anti-liberal websites such as http://www.RatherBiased.com and http://www.BoycottCBS.com, not to mention Doonesbury's ridiculous foreign correspondent Roland Hedley Jr., an R.E.M. hit and "Rather-gate."
As comic Jon Stewart recently pointed out, last September's 60 Minutes II fiasco, which had Rather questioning President George W. Bush's National Guard service with documents that could not be authenticated, was the only scandal of the election campaign to have merited a "-gate."
Which brings us to those pajamahadeen, the online brigades who claim credit for bringing those documents into question — and forcing Rather to apologize for his reporting.
The right-wing bloggers proudly dubbed themselves that — a play on muhajadeen, as in Muslim guerrilla fighters — when former CBS exec Jonathan Klein, in the wake of the scandal, complained to Fox News that "bloggers have no checks and balances.
"You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances (on network news) and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."
By checks and balances, Klein meant the rigours of professional journalism — and not the opinionating of the blogosphere.
Ironically, bloggers mostly feed off the work of professional journalists who do the legwork. But, like parasites too stupid to realize they are killing off their hosts, the pajamahadeen don't get it every time they dig more dirt for our mass grave.
"Network news is dying and good riddence (sic)!" jubilated one of them yesterday.
It's true that journalism's checks and balances have been known to fail. When they do, news organizations crash and burn in spectacular fashion. But, much like the thousands of airplanes that land safely every day and don't make the news, major disasters are few and far between.
Still, the credibility of the corporate media continues to plummet.
In March, the Washington-based Project for Excellence in Journalism published The State of the News Media 2004, which documents an increase in superficiality and sensationalism, the declining reach of newspapers and network newscasts, cutbacks in newsroom resources and, most significantly, rising public distrust and disdain for our reportage.
Then, in June, the Canadian Media Research Consortium, a national project led by three University-based organizations to promote research on the media, (http://www.cmrcccrm.ca) came out with its Report Card On Canadian News Media. While it showed that Canadians are significantly more positive about our news sources than Americans are, citizens here believe that "powerful people or organizations" have too much influence on the media agenda.
One thing is clear from both studies: The shift from mainstream media to alternate sources such as the ethnic press, cable networks and the Internet, are threatening the future of the solid, stolid mainstream journalism.
And we don't know how to deal with it. Recently, for example, the news came from the U.K. that staid old papers are going tabloid, while the Washington Post will lighten up — all to attract elusive younger readers.
As for the newscasts of the type that Rather hosts, well, one look at the commercials for arthritis pills will tell you plenty about their demographics.
Paradoxically, young people are crowding into journalism schools, many of them in search of network TV stardom.
Still, the pajamahadeen are waging war on the mainstream media.
That includes the paper you're reading, even if you're not reading it on paper, since it is the actually selling of this paper which pays for the content you may now be reading gratis.
By the end of today, who knows how many bloggers will have had at this column? Many of them often shoot me down — and some do a pretty good job. (See letitbleed.blogs.com)
But, just like trigger happy celebrants in the Middle East, who have yet to figure out that what goes up must come down, they can't see that, by firing up at us, they will also kill themselves.
Lefties are spending entirely too much time looking over our shoulders for their articles.
Reminds me of that pimply-faced idiot who sat next to me in science class and copied all my test answers!
What a stupid straw man argument this column is. How many bloggers actually want to see the complete and utter demise of major news outlets?
It is so obvious she has felt the power of 'blogs' and while she recognizes what is happening, she is mortified by its magnitude.
Thanks for digging that up.
Amen, I still remember when me and a few others ran down the second confirmed Anthrax case in the US after the first scare. Making phone calls and networking with on the spot freepers will beat major media by a few hours.
I just wrote this to this lady:
"Dear Ms. Zerbisias:
The genie is out of the bottle. The leftists and socialists groomed at journalism schools to practice "advocacy journalism" are on the way out. Down here in the US, we absolutely refuse the policies and prattle of the failed bureaucrats and p.c. fascists like those who run your country. You may want to be another France but we don't. Our leftist media down here is going to be held to account or they will have no readership or viewers left who do not agree with them politically. You are wise to fear the blogosphere. And yes, I am a Freeper too.
The Dan Rather's of the world did everything they could to lie and fabricate the news during the recent election. His attempt to use forgeries should be prosecuted. He was deliberately trying to influence the election through fraud. Your piece reads like you believe this was an innocent mistake. It was not.
Rather has never met a communist or a dictator he didn't like. He has posed for portraits with Castro, Ortega, and Saddam Hussein. Yet he disparaged presidential candidate George Bush in a famous interview during the 1988 campaign. He ran Nixon out of office. He is a partisan for the Democrats and always has been, right down to attending their fund raisers.. So was his forerunner Cronkite who lied about the Tet Offensive. The only shame is that we are just now catching these clowns and that they won't serve jail time for sedition.
We have another source for the media today. The online blogs, talkradio and conservative websites could be wrong twice a day and have a better track record than the traditional media, and we can trust them not to be in cahoots with the national Democratic party and blindly following ideological poisons.. And if you haven't heard, Evan Thomas of Newsweek told someone on TV recently, "There is fifty percent of the population out there that doesn't believe a word we say." Why do you think that is? A doctor that lies to his patients won't have a practice for long. That's the state of modern journalism, who dropped their duty as gatekeepers of information many years ago for the sake of indoctrinating people with leftist ideology. These were the people bellowing for a nuclear freeze back in the eighties. They told us the Soviet people were happy and that there was no communist threat ever. They were wrong then and they are wrong now. And we don't have to listen or read them anymore at last. Hoorah.
I'm a college graduate and I taught college for ten years. I worked in the media for a quarter of a century. I know how sausage is made. I've read the textbooks. So drop your words like "stupid," because we are anything but that. Your turn in Canada is coming. Fox News is coming to Canada and they will turn your country upside down. They give all sides and often favor ours. That shouldn't bother you, since the Bolshevik side will continue to receive 99 percent play. But watch more and more of your Canucks and outlanders starting to sound like our southern and western folk. It's amazing what a little unfettered, uncensored information can do. Your people may even begin to vote like our wonderful state of Alaska, a great patriotic land.
Politics aside, I wish you the very best personally and professionally. That's another thing. If you got to know us conservatives in other than the abstract, you might really come to like us. We are the common people. Not the intelligencia or the rich hotty tots. We believe in God, family, and guns. We believe government should serve, period. And as for marriage, we believe the Bible has taken care of that issue pretty well. And for now, we are winning.
And I hope a few million of our whiney losers will carry out their threats to join you in your Canadian socialist utopia. Unfortunately, I fear a tremendous bluff. Too bad.
Sincerely..."
Luke, that is an excellent letter. It would be great to see her submit it for publication as a response to her column, but I am betting she won't.
There are two types of relationships, parasitic and synergistic. Hopefully we can use both to kill off the unethical Leftist media, while fair and balanced thrives more than ever.
This journalist thinks they do solid work? hahahaha
The web bloggers cut right to the chase and don't have to go through miles and miles of BS to reach a sane conclusion. Bottom line, FR exposes the way they try to present the news in the way they want you to see it instead of how it actually is.
I would replace "borderline" with "totally." Otherwise, you're spot on. :-)
ANTONIA ZERBISIAS = Extinct Dinosaur Turd.
my goodness, she looks a little like a young helen thomas...
it must be a leftist gene that turns their women into arafat look alikes...
Antonia, babe,
We can do your job better. You sound like the last bleatings of a dying elephant surrounded by hyenas.
Quite true. I also do that.
I disagree with the author of that article.
He says that bloggers have no checks and balances, when in fact it is the MSM that never had them.
The irony of it is, the bloggers are the checks and balances the MSM direly needed.
Thanks for the ping, DV!And that's a great letter there in #305, Luke21!
Way to go Freepers and Bloggers, etc. !!
She is up Denial without a paddle.
Note, especially, that there isn't one scintilla of evidence for her spectactular prediction of the demise of bloggers.
On the other hand, we uncover tons of evidence every day of the sloth, corruption, tendentiousness, arrogance, and stupidity of the media, government officials, and others.
Another poster posted the ratings chart for ABCCBSNBC. Advertizers pay more for fewer eyeballs. This is a picture of an arrogant empire in decline. Newspapers have been fudging circulation numbers - their own "Enron." I wonder if her paper, the Toronto Star, will get caught doing that, too? (We can expect her to spash a spectacular headline about that, right?)
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