Blogged Down [Whine Alert]

The American Prospect ^ | March 4. 2005 | Garance Franke-Ruta

[Coastal]

During one especially hectic week in mid-February, the Internet took three scalps in what appeared to be unrelated events. Liberal bloggers forced Talon News White House correspondent James D. Guckert, a k a “Jeff Gannon,” to resign after it was revealed that he was writing under a false name for a Republican activist group (GOPUSA), that he was not really a journalist at all, and that he had posed nude on the Internet in an effort to solicit sex for money. Conservative bloggers, meanwhile, created a firestorm after Eason Jordan, the chief news executive for CNN, made controversial remarks during an off-the-record panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, suggesting that the U.S. military had targeted journalists in war zones. Jordan was forced to resign. Finally, in Maryland, Joseph Steffen, a longtime aide to Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich, was fired after reporters exposed him as the author of e-mails and anonymous Web-site postings encouraging rumors about the marriage of Baltimore’s popular mayor, Martin O’Malley, a potential ’06 challenger to Ehrlich.

All unrelated stories, except for the Internet angle, right? Well, no.

[martin_fierro]

They're STILL harping on Gannon?

Time to MoveOnDotSTFU.

[Lazamataz]

I scanned this idiots 'essay'.

He first claims three scalps were taken: Gannon, Jordan, and Steffen. Two of these three were clearly losses for Republicans.

He then goes on to blame "Republican operatives" for all three.

He's not so much an idiot, as he is deliberately disingenuous.

[ModelBreaker]

But there’s another a key difference between the effort against Gannon and conservative blog firestorms: The targets of the liberal blogosphere are conservative activists; the target of the conservative blogosphere is the free and independent press itself [ie Dan Rather], just as it has been for conservative activists since the ’60s.

This quote summarizes the silliness of this article. Anyone who does not regard Dan Rather as a Leftist activist hasn't been watching the news or, is himself, a Leftist activist.

[Panzerlied]

Not only that; he lies! :>)

[Lazamataz]

And does so badly.

[mdittmar]

the Internet took three scalps?

This from a liberal website,it's so "mean spirited",a "hate crime" even;)

[Lazamataz]

On the other hand, exactly what was I expecting from somebody named Garance Franke-Ruta????

[gitmo]

The Gannon scalping is different from the Jordan and Rather controversies in two very important ways. First, whereas the conservative bloggers were out to destroy journalists with distinguished careers who’d made serious missteps, the liberal bloggers on Gannon’s trail were seeking to expose an out-and-out fraud. How in the world can you say that Rather's story, based on obviously forged documents, was anything besides out-and-out fraud? Second, while some of the conservative bloggers going after Jordan and Rather were mistaken for regular citizens by the mainstream media, the liberal bloggers were very much out in the open. The conservatives were citizens, right? In what way were they irregular?

[woofie]

As I understand this ...Liberals are good ...Conservatives are bad

[B.O. Plenty]

Garance Franke-Ruta!......I saw the name and decided to forget the article. I never trust skinny cooks or people with hyphenated names.

[Coastal]

You could have saved "Garance Franke-Ruta" about 2500+ words.

[Milhous]

Which brings us back to Jordan. He was brought down not by outraged citizen-bloggers but by a mix of GOP operatives and military conservatives.

Kook puts on his tin foil hat.

The Gannon scalping is different from the Jordan and Rather controversies in two very important ways.

Kook misses the biggest difference:

Of course, the lefty bloggers are determined to make Gannon into a huge story. But no matter how many times the great hunters say "Did you see the size of that chipmunk!" and no matter how much parsley you garnish the plate with, it's still a chipmunk. Goldberg

[sevry]

instead of taking these bloggers for the political activists they are, all too often the established press has accepted their claims of being a new form of journalism.

That's essentially this guy's complaint. I'm not sure the point of posting conspiracy-theory leftism on FR. But they're very predictable. Just let them keep talking, or writing, and suddenly their real complaint is revealed.

This guy doesn't want the LM, the 'press' component of the leftwing's mainstream at least, to give the 'blogs' any credit, or presumeably any converage. If it were nothing but 'wonkette' and other libs, I'm sure this guy would have no complaint. But it involves FR, and PLB, and LGF and others. And he's really . . . . bothered. That's about all his article comes to.

[SnuffaBolshevik]

Joseph Steffen’s online mudslinging toward Mayor O’Malley followed a more old-fashioned strategy. Steffen, a political operative who called himself the “Prince of Darkness,” was fired from Governor Ehrlich’s administration for planting salacious rumors on the Internet in August and October 2004 about a fictional affair between O’Malley and an African-American TV journalist. Steffen’s narrative is simpler, but connections to the same Republican operatives abound. After Steffen, writing under the handle “ncpac,” seeded clues to the anchorwoman’s identity on a FreeRepublic.com thread, other conservative bloggers posted pictures of the reporter’s face online, defaming her as well as O’Malley. The rumors swirled in Annapolis, Maryland’s capitol, for 18 months before the story broke into the open on February 9, a day after a real reporter, from The Washington Post, confronted Steffen with the FreeRepublic postings.

Where I went to school, 18 months from August 2004 would be February 2006. This person is clearly a buffoon.