Posted on 02/15/2005 5:10:24 AM PST by FlyLow
Real fear is mixing with snarky disdain in the "mainstream" media's attitude toward web loggers in the wake of the resignation last Friday of Eason Jordan as CNN's top news executive.
"Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters," said the headline in the New York Times Monday, the first time many of the newspaper's readers were made aware of a controversy which had been roiling for nearly two weeks.
"The New York Times media beat reporters got beaten badly on the Eason Jordan story — by (gasp!) web logs and cable news — and so how do they react? By catching their readers up on what they missed? Of course not. They react by lashing out at web logs," said Jeff Jarvis, whose views were misrepresented in the Times' story.
Web loggers who criticized Jordan are "sons of Sen. McCarthy," said Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum. "It is very worrying to see this marriage between self-proclaimed citizens' media and mainstream journalists' scalp hunters," he said.
"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail," said Steve Lovelady, who edits the web site of the Columbia Journalism Review. For those of you unfamiliar with the controversy — that is to say, for those of you who get your news from the "mainstream" media — in a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Jan. 27, Jordan said the U.S. military was deliberately killing journalists in Iraq. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass), a fellow panelist, demanded proof, which Jordan couldn't supply.
Miami businessman Rony Abovitz, who was in attendance, reported on what Jordan said in his web log. This was read by big foot bloggers Hugh Hewitt, Ed Morrissey (Captains Quarters), Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit) and the gang at Power Line, who expressed outrage.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
It's times like this I let my tagline speak for itself.
The Internet 'blogging, etc.' is a distributed information network, which is inherently more reliable than centralized information sources, because any erroneous/malicious nodes on the highly-distributed system are readily bypassed and overwhelmed by the many other, more-truthful nodes. As we have seen with CBS and the NYT, there is no such self-correction in centralized-information sources.
Yup. Such self-restraint on Bawnee's part is commendable.
Thanks to Newton, MA for giving us such a fine specimen of a public servant.
Best explanation-reply of the month, e.
He just wanted to get to the meat of the issue. Can you blame the guy for wanting the facts behind him? I mean, looking at it his way, the accusers hardly pricked the bubble of this thing.
Franks is usually a tight-fisted politico, but often on the receiving end. This time he stuck it to them. I'm sure the whole thing was hard for him to swallow.
The year 1979 was when Alvin Toffler wrote perhaps his most famous book, The Third Wave. One chapter in that book, "De-Massifying the Media," foretold of the day that as communications technologies improve the concentrated power of mass media companies will wane. The modern public Internet has pretty much validated that chapter of the book, and then some.
You just described one chapter in Hugh Hewitt's new book.
Pity.
:o)
Yeah, story is he remarked on the way out of the hearing "I never sausage lousy backup."
Hmmm... Oops. Seems he forgot about the part where McCarthy was proven right, and if anything, he didn't go far enough!
TKS [ jim geraghty reporting ]
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WHAT TO SAY NEXT TIME SOMEBODY CALLS BLOGGERS A LYNCH MOB [02/16 02:56 PM]
The great Eugene Volokh uses about five minutes of logic to dismantle the "blogs are a lynch mob" argument.
"The trouble is that here the analogy is extremely weak. What's wrong with lynch mobs? It's that the mob itself has the power to kill. They could be completely wrong, and entirely unpersuasive to reasonable people or to the rest of the public. Yet by their physical power, they can impose their will without regard to the law.
But bloggers, or critics generally, have power only to the extent that they are persuasive. Jordan's resignation didn't come because he was afraid that bloggers will fire him. They can't fire him. I assume that to the extent the bloggers' speech led him to resign, it did so by persuading the public that he wasn't trustworthy.
So Jordan's critics (bloggers or not) aren't a lynch mob: If they're a mob, they're at most a "persuasion mob." What's more, since they're generally a very small group, they're really a "persuasion bunch.""
There we go. I think the Pajamahadeen would relish the title of a "persuasion bunch."
February 18, 2005
Jack Kelly: Bloggers Aren't The McCarthyites In Eason's Fables
*****************************************************************
Jack Kelly wrote an impressive column three days ago for the Jewish World Review that I missed. He addressed the mass-media spin on Eason's Fables as a McCarthyite witch hunt perpetrated by a bunch of overzealous wannabes. Kelly points out that the real McCarthyite lost his job as a result of the journalism he once represented:
Web loggers who criticized Jordan are "sons of Sen. McCarthy," said Bertrand Pecquerie, director of the World Editors Forum. "It is very worrying to see this marriage between self-proclaimed citizens' media and mainstream journalists' scalp hunters," he said. ...Pecquerie and Lovelady have their allegations of "McCarthyism" backward. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis) became famous in the 1950s for making hysterical and (mostly) unfounded accusations that individuals in the State department and the Army were secret communists. It was Jordan who made hysterical and unfounded accusations against the U.S. military, and it is "mainstream" journalists who are now making hysterical and unfounded accusations against web loggers. ...
But the key fact is not that Eason Jordan is now looking for work, but that bloggers were trying to uncover the truth about what he said, while "professional journalists" were trying to suppress it. For us, the "people's right to know"— which we invoke in self-righteous tones when we're prying into the private lives of people who are not journalists — takes a back seat to protecting the reputations of members of our club.
I've read some good columns on our efforts to just get the truth out about Eason Jordan, but Jack Kelly may have the best retort against the McCarthyism charges I've yet read. In fact, we have been somewhat remiss in not specifically pointing out what Kelly reminds us -- that Eason Jordan, with his vague but grandiose allegations about military atrocities and utter lack of substantiation, represents real McCarthyism.
That particular charge, coming with mind-numbing frequency from the Left, has lost most of its meaning, and so hardly registers any more when heard. But in thinking about it seriously, what enraged the blogging community most about Jordan was that McCarthyite quality of his repeated charges. Both had no evidence, although both were in uniquely powerful positions to make that evidence known had it truly existed. Both used their allegations for political gain; in Jordan's case, promoting anti-American views allowed him the political capital to extend CNN's commercial interests. Both men used the US military as their target. Both men tried to vaguely dissemble when challenged on the merits of their case, and in the end both men crumbled when the spotlight of public exposure trained fully on the facts. In fact, video undid both men, although in McCarthy's case it was the video that was seen by Americans, while in Jordan's case it was the video that remains hidden from their view, at least in part with the silent consent of a news organization supposedly dedicated to ensuring access to information.
One key difference: for Joe McCarthy, the mainstream media finally had the nerve to say, "Enough!" In Eason's Fables, the mainstream media remained an enabler and provided cover for Jordan, literally to the very end. The bloggers, myself included but hardly alone or even first, stepped up and exposed Jordan for what both he and McCarthy were: fools who tried to aggrandize themselves by using slanderous accusations against the US military. That the Left cannot tell the difference between that and the people who ultimately exposed the lies shows exactly how far they have slid into irrelevance and unreality.
RELEASE THE TAPE!
Good one- thanks for the ping.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1345962/posts
Journalist group calls US to account over Iraq
Guardian ^ | 02/18/05 | Dominic Timms
Posted on 02/18/2005 8:25:08 AM CST by Pikamax
Journalist group calls US to account over Iraq
Dominic Timms Friday February 18, 2005
The US government was today accused of hiding behind a "culture of denial" over the deaths of at least 12 journalists who are alleged to have perished at the hands of the US military in Iraq.
Re-igniting the debate that US soldiers deliberately "targeted" journalists during the Iraqi occupation, a press freedom body called on the US to take "responsibility" for its actions in the country.
Responding to what it said was the "hounding out" of the CNN news chief, Eason Jordan, the International Federation of Journalists called on the US administration to come clean over its "mistakes" in the region.
snip
His words linger on...
Commie idiots!
Yes, indeed, but we have MASS and therefore we have teeth with our persuasion.
"The US government was today accused of hiding behind a "culture of denial" over the deaths of at least 12 journalists who are alleged to have perished at the hands of the US military in Iraq."
Ok boys, where's the evidence? Not hear-say 5th-hand info from the friend of a cousin of hHillary's illegitimate brother-in-law. Real, first-hand, documented evidence.
Oh, you don't have it? Sorry, next, thankyou for playing.
Braaaannnnnn
Game over.
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