Posted on 02/14/2005 9:12:05 AM PST by Congressman Billybob
An article by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post on the Eason Jordan resignation quoted Steve Lovelady "of Columbia Journalism Review" as saying of this event, "The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail." This struck me as a grossly unprofessional remark by anyone who claimed to be a journalist.
So, I wrote a detailed letter to the Editor of the Review, demanding an apology. Back came a letter this morning from Mr. Lovelady, which makes it clear that neither he nor the Review have a clue about the blogosphere. They do not understand our work, nor do they understand why Jordan had to go.
I wrote back to Mr. Lovelady. Those three letters follow in the order they were written. I think y'all will conclude from reading these letters that the Columbia Journalism Review, which is both the temple and contains the high priests of the MSM, is grossly out of touch with the real world in 2005. Read, and weep.
I have received no reply from the Editor of the CJR.
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To: the Editors of the Columbia Journalism Review
From: John Armor, Esq.
re: The Lovelady quote in Kurtz's article
date: 14 February 2005
Ladies & Gentlemen,
You apparently have a journalistically incompetent person working for your magazine.
Here is a quote from Howard Kurtz' article in today's Washington Post about the resignation of Eason Jordan from CNN.
"Hours after Jordan stepped down, Steve Lovelady of Columbia Journalism Review e-mailed his verdict to New York University professor and blogger Jay Rosen: 'The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail.' "
If this is an accurate quote, then Steve Lovelady is an incompetent journalist. Here's why I reach that conclusion:
I am one of the "salivating morons" as part of the "lynch mob" which brought down Dan Rather, and hit CBS hard. We were at work seeking to get a transcript, preferably a copy of the video tape, from Davos, so we could hang Eason Jordan's precise words around his neck like a dead albatross. Like all good journalists, we prefer first-hand evidence rather than second-hand hearsay, even if there are multiple hearsay sources who basically agree and seem reliable.
As I told the attendees at a dinner in Asheville, N.C., Friday night, Jordan was our next "target of opportunity," as Slim Pickens said in his second-greatest movie, Dr. Strangelove. I predicted then that Jordan would resign, or be fired, within 30 days. I did not expect results as quickly as they came.
My concern here is about being called a "salivating moron" and a member of a "lynch mob." A little investigation of the facts should be in order before such labels are attached.
I am a graduate of Yale (two majors), Maryland Law (highest honors, Con Law), Ph.D. work at American University in Public Policy, author of seven books and more than 550 articles, briefed 18 cases in the US Supreme Court. Anyone who cares to, can use Google and Amazon to track down my particulars. On the Internet I am known as Congressman Billybob. Overall, I have published about three million words, give or take a few paragraphs. My next book is on Thomas Paine. (Yeah, right, I am a "salivating moron" and I hang out with a "lynch mob.")
The bottom line is this: I have a fairly typical background of the members of the "Pajama Patrol," as we have called ourselves ever since Joel Klein of CNN (then of CBS) dismissed us as "a bunch of guys in their pajamas, in front of their computers." My friend "Buckhead," for instance, has an able background but less achievement than I, because he is quite a bit younger through no fault of his own.
Steve Lovelady should not be dismissing any group of people as "morons" and a "lynch mob" when he knows nothing about us as human beings. That indicates a case of political bigotry, which is a fatal flaw in any would-be journalist. I render no judgment about whether Mr. Lovelady is "too dumb to swallow his own spit," a phrase we occasionally use here in the backwoods of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I know nothing about him other than this one quote as reported by Howard Kurtz.
But I would say he owes us a mite of an apology. What do y'all think?
If you take accurate journalism seriously, I expect to hear from you.
Sincerely,
[personal information deleted]
Post Script: Perhaps the CJR should publish an article about the leaders of the "new media." I don't count myself as a leader, but I know these folks well.
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Steve Lovelady wrote:
Brent Cunningham was kid enough to pass your note along to me.
The quote is accurate, but your interpretation is not. I did not say every poli-blogger, or even every blogger gunning for Jordan, is a slavering moron.
I did say, "The slavering morons who make up the lynch mob prevail." That is not the same as saying that every poli-blogger, or even every blogger gunning for Jordan, is a slavering moron. It is to say that those who do fit that description have prevailed in this instance. And believe me, for every one of you, there are 100 of them out there yammering away with mob-like glee.
If you doubt the accuracy of that characterization, I invite you to a long thread on Vodka Pundit on the topic yesterday. Please read each post -- there are 75 or so at last count, including a few from me -- and then come back and tell me these guys are playing with a full deck. Or that it is I, not they, who owe an apology.
I don't think you can. And that blog is just one of dozens frothing with blood and spittle over the same issue.
The hyenas are still gnawing the bones.
Perhaps that's why this morning, if you take the time to read,you will discover that even the high priests of the poliblog world -- Jeff Jarvis, Captain Ed, Jay Rosen -- are publically wringing their hands over what they have wrought. As well they should.
Steve Lovelady
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Dear Steve,
I was surprised to hear from you. It is to your credit that you did respond.
You suggest to me that I should read the posts on Vodka Pundit is misplaced. I read hundreds of posts every day from the "tin foil hats" on both the left and the right. I have never had the slightest doubt that such people exist, and file their screeds on the Internet.
But you make the mistake of confusing the players for the fans.
It may well be that the fans of the South Thwackingham Football Team are dangerous hooligans. But that leads to no valid conclusion about the Thwackingham footballers on the field who actually score the goals.
There are perhaps 200 people in the blogosphere who are at the cutting edge of all the issues that may arise. All of us operate the same way that I was trained to function as a lawyer. Assemble the evidence, reduce it to a cogent argument, and then argue it to the jury. In our cases, the "jury" is a few hundred editors in the MSM who make the decisions about what will be reported, and how. In our cases, we know that the jury is predisposed to bury the story we are promoting, so we always have an uphill fight.
Our work is "peer-reviewed" in that tens of thousands of people will read what we write, and some will seek to take it apart, brick by brick. So what we write has to be solidly based and defensible.
Now we turn to the issue of whether Eason Jordan should have been forced out. In my judgment, and that of many leaders in the blogosphere, he should have been fired years ago, when he admitted that CNN had coddled Saddam Hussein by suppressing negative stories about him, in order to keep its Baghdad Bureau open. Any news director who will suppress the truth for institutional gain, does not belong in the business. So, the Davos speech was the second major reason for dumping Jordan, not the first.
I was amazed that he resigned so swiftly. I conclude that he realized we would get our hands on the videotape of his remarks, and that that tape would have made his career sink like a brick in a well. We had reconstructed his comments from second-hand reports, but apparently the actual tape was even worse than we imagined.
The people who "prevailed" in l'affaire Jordan were not the followers, whose "spittle" offends you. It was the leaders of the effort, including me. We were right to push Jordan to resign. We are not "slavering morons." And you DO owe us an apology.
Lastly, the tenor of your note to me suggests that you still lack a working understanding of what the blogosphere does, and why it is important. It is important that the Columbia Journalism Review develop a real understanding of the "new media." Absent such an understanding of an influence that will more and more drive the MSM, the Review and its staff will become increasingly irrelevant to its subject, like a buggy whip factory in 1910, puzzled by the decline in its market.
Sincerely,
John Armor (Congressman Billybob}
JimRob seems to be eager to be subpoenaed on this one -- the server logs would seem to prove that this whole thing was a set-up from the start.
Which is a darn good reason why he doesn't get the blogsphere - he probably despises criticism and give-and-take, especially from the drooling rabble, which, in his mind, is everyone not on an editorial board at a major newspaper.
Am I missing somthing or is this Steve Lovelady
using Clintonesque parsing.
EX: X says "Republicans do not care about the educating the poor"
Y replies "I am a Republican and I volunteer one day a week to tutor disadvanteged youth and my wife and I donate $5000 a year to the United Negro College fund"
X says "I did not say ALL Republicans do not care about educating the poor"
Good catch.. the liberable two-step.
Thanks for posting this!
You might see it this way.. but I don't. Perhaps some editor of some MSM will pick up on something here.. but frankly. This source is better and news consumers can find blogs and bloggers that they trust.
Its my understanding that Free Republic has something on the order of 170,000 viewers now. Not network news level yet.. but I wonder what the numbers for the whole blogosphere are now. What if you add Drudge?
I have often seen Hannity, Rush or Drudge as the cross over point for the conservative voices in the Blogosphere. Once this crossover occurs, the mentions happen, then the MSM starts working the story.
I feel this is the difference with the Eason Jordon story. It never crossed over until it blew up. The natural progression would have been to cross over and then blow into the MSM.. but something told CNN that this was going to get ugly.. so they cut their losses early once the handwriting was on the wall.
I guess to get back to the point, why do you talk about being a stringer for the MSM? Trying to get their attention? You are a whole lot more interesting then that. If they are paying attention its because this is where the news gets tumbled and digested right now because the blogosphere is not normally a primary source medium. It is an analysis medium. But with Michelle Malkin and many of the "power" bloggers this is changing. Captain Ed or The guys at Powerline, jim geraghty are doing primary source work, interviewing people and finding leads and doing real reporting. We might have lost a Gannon, such as he was, but I fully expect one or two serious bloggers to join the Whitehouse press corps in the next month or two.
Your message to Columbia needs to be more along the line of ...
Lead, Follow or get the heck out of the way.
News is no longer a one-way process - we report, you eat. Sam Smith at Progressive Review said it well years ago - reporters tried dipping their toes into the waters of the internet until the aquatic life snapped back. Reporters don't like that. They don't like feedback. They like their articles and their opinions to be carved into newsprint, with hundreds of thousands of copies delivered to the consumer, with maybe one or two letters to the editor coming back that hardly anyone reads anyway.
But things are different now. It used to be that all those who disagreed with the facts and/or the opinions expressed in a given newspaper had to gnash their teeth alone. But no longer. Now they can reach out through the internet. Share research. Dissect the column or the article. And make life absolutely miserable for the author.
Before Easongate, the MSM still viewed the blogsphere as an annoyance. Yeah, sure, we bit Rather in the ass. But he screwed up so bad that he was an easy target.
But there was a sea change this week. It used to be that the rabble out here in 'Netland had to beg and cajole the MSM to dip down and cover a story we were concerned about. If a tree fell in the blogsphere and the MSM didn't notice, well, it didn't make a sound. But a tree fell in the blogsphere this week... and it crunched a bigshot. And that tends to make all other bigshots, no matter what their political views may be, sit up and take notice. And start looking around for any widowmakers hanging over their heads.
Which is why we saw media sphincters tighten across the land. Fox News. The Wall Street Journal. Folks who normally, one would think, would be glad to see a cad like Eason Jordan finally called on the carpet. But there was a problem. It wasn't Fox News or the Wall Street Journal that called him out. It was the rabble. And suddenly, every MSM journalist woke up in a cold sweat and realized that they had lost control of the process. It now belongs to the democracy of the mob, and to the raw ability of ANYONE who is capable to make an argument and win in the marketplace of ideas.
As for me, I will no longer watch Fox News Sunday for validation of the work I do all week to present my views in the outside chance that Brit or some other panelist will cover my views with a glancing commentary. As of February 13th, 2005, we are now on equal footing with the MSM when it comes to setting the agenda. And the news will never be the same again.
ping to post #49 and your honest feedback on what I said. I personally think that the last week witnessed one of the most fundamental power shifts in this country as we have seen in some time. Please chime in whether you think I'm right, wrong, or should just drool into my cup....
http://www.campaigndesk.org/snitz/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=146
Muck around with the topic id numbers if you think there should be more.
I think we need more time to see how things develop.
I agree. But I saw something in the faces of all the talking heads this weekend that I had never seen before. I literally saw fear in their faces. And I have read fear in many of the print and internet columns asking why CNN sacked Jordan. They are afraid, IMO, because they have realized that they no longer control the news and the flow of information. They will recover from this fear and be formidable for years to come as the power struggle continues. But this was the first time they realized that the bloggers actually had the ability to storm their Bastille...
In general, I agree with almost all of the comments in both of your detailed and thoughtful posts. I have only two related caveats.
The blogosphere does not have, and never should have, anything akin to an Editor in Chief or a Publisher. In short, there is no desk anywhere to put the plaque that says, "The buck stops here." On the other hand, there are a limited number of people who are at the top of the heap. I'll point, for instance, to Glen Reynolds at Instapundit.
One can quarrel how many people are in the top rank. And it is important to consider both liberal and conservative "top rank" people, even though they will disagree sometimes on what issue should lead, and how it should play out. However, I submit that the most generous count of all the people who are top line effective in carrying any issue in the blogosphere will come up with 200 names, give or take a few. Admittedly there are tens of thousands of participants. But like football, golf, Jeopardy!, rock music, published books, and all other competitive venues, it is fairly clear that a few lead, and many follow and react.
The same is true on the other side of the media divide. There are only a few hundred decision-makers, maybe less than that, who decide what is REALLY an issue over there. When we, the blogosphere persuade or force those few to take up an issue, we have succeeded.
dalight, you make an important point. This may be the first major instance where we (bloggers) forced the issue, and we got the ultimate result (Jordan out) WITHOUT the issue ever blossoming fully in the MSM. We forced the process to skip a step.
This may not be any more than an aberration, however. All along, we were trying to get a copy of the tape, which does exist. Maybe Jordan reviewed the tape, it was worse than any of us had guessed, and therefore on this issue he bailed quickly before the tape or transcript came out, i.e., before this became a full-dress MSM story. Just an educated guess.
John / Billybob
My wife made the same observation. Nailing Rather required bringing the MSM into the fight, in order to "validate" the errors we'd caught in Rather's charges. The MSM was out to lunch for this campaign.
Indeed, I recall that the Washington Post was one of the first to follow-up and develop the Rather story. Yet, when the Post finally got around to covering the Eason Jordan story, they assigned Howard Kurtz, of all people, and he performed a whitewash. Well, the story was on his beat, after all. But Kurtz and the Post pointedly did not alert their readers to the fact that Kurtz was also employed by CNN and, thus, highly conflicted.
I took this to mean that the Post had decided, for their own good (and, perhaps, the entire MSM), the Eason Jordan story was best buried. It was a tacit recognition of the power of the web -- and, this time, they weren't about to aid and abet the upstarts, Lovelady's "salivating morons" and "lynch mob".
Still, Jordan's position eventually became untenable...and he resigned. Neither the Washington Post nor any other MSM outlet ever so much as viewed his statements with "concern" -- much less "alarm".
The Eason Jordan story was begun by, sustained by and finished by the web community -- operating virtually alone. That is a watershed moment.
We're neither kingmakers nor kingkillers here at Free Republic. But we probably wield more power than we might think.
Would Rather have been discredited without Buckhead and Free Republic? Possibly...but the odds would have been measurably longer.
Would Bush have won Florida in 2000 without the efforts of FReepers on the ground, throwing a monkey wrench into the Democrats' efforts to manufacture votes? I'm not certain.
I'm convinced that, without Free Republic, William Jefferson Clinton would never have been impeached.
And I rather doubt Eason Jordan will be either forgetting or forgiving us. Howell Raines won't be sending us a Valentine's Day card, either.
With that power comes responsibility. The guy who runs this place has set the standards. So far, I believe, we've all been a good check on each other. At any given time, every "reporter" on Free Republic has a thousand-or-so of the toughest editors in the business checking his work, testing his theses, confirming his facts...and correcting his grammar and spelling.
All in all, it's an honor and a privilege to be here. And, yes, I believe we've done some very good work lately...and there is, indeed, a new paradigm in the news business today.
Though I registered to post, I'm not interested in using CJR Daily as a rule. It's not worth my time. I just wanted to reply to Lovelady only, since we have a correspondence.
John / Billybob
Damn, you're good!
And THAT, as you and others have noted, IS a paradigm shift different from what has come before. As the Chinese say, may we live in interesting times. John / Billybob
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